After debating the term in a recent Slashdot subthread, longtime reader Tablizer wants to pose the question to a larger audience: what exactly are 'microservices'? Over the past few years I've asked many colleagues what "microservices" are, and get a gazillion different answers. "Independent deploy-ability" has been an issue as old as the IBM hills. Don't make anything "too big" nor "too small"; be it functions, files, apps, name-spaces, tables, databases, etc.

Overly large X's didn't need special terms, such as "monofunction". We'd just call it "poorly partitioned/sized/factored". (Picking the right size requires skill and experience, both in technology and the domain.) Dynamic languages are usually "independently deployable" at the file level, so what is a PHP "monolith", for example?

Puzzles like this are abound when trying to use the Socratic method to tease out specific-ness. Socrates would quit and become a goat herder, as such discussions often turn sour and personal. Here's a recent Slashdot subthread debating the term.

GitLab shares plunged as much as 38% in extended trading after the provider of source code management software gave full-year revenue guidance that fell short of expectations. CNBC reports: Here's how the company did:

Earnings: Loss of 3 cents per share, adjusted, vs. loss of 14 cents per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
Revenue: $122.9 million, vs. $119.6 million as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv. Revenue increased 58% year over year in the quarter that ended Jan. 31, according to a statement.

GitLab called for a fiscal first-quarter adjusted loss of 14 cents to 15 cents per share on $117 million to $118 million in revenue. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv had expected an adjusted loss of 16 cents per share and revenue of $126.2 million. For the 2024 fiscal year, the company sees an adjusted loss of 24 cents to 29 cents per share and $529 million to $533 million in revenue. That works out to 25% growth at the middle of the range. The consensus among analysts polled by Refinitiv was an adjusted loss of 54 cents per share and $586.4 million in revenue. During the quarter Gitlab said that in April its premium service tier will go up to $29 per month from $19.

Reddit is currently experiencing a big outage affecting its websites and apps, according to the company's status page. The Verge reports: "We've identified an internal systems issue and are working to determine a fix," the company wrote at 12:56PM ET on its status page. The preceding message, from nearly 40 minutes before, notes that Reddit is "is currently offline." The problem appears to be widespread, with about 50,000 people reporting issues on Downdetector.

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook parent company Meta, which emerged as an outspoken advocate of remote work during the pandemic, is encouraging employees to come back to the office. Some early analysis "suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement Tuesday. Zuckerberg cautioned that the data requires further study, but encouraged employees to "find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person" in the meantime. In 2021, Facebook established a policy that allowed all employees to work remotely even after the pandemic if their jobs could be done outside of an office. Several big tech companies including Amazon, Apple and Twitter have been trying to get workers to return to the office.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Google Pixel Fold could be available as soon as the second week in June, according to WinFuture's Roland Quandt. The reliable leaker tweeted on Tuesday that the phone will come with 256GB base storage and that you'll be able to get it in either a black / dark gray color or white. The foldable has been rumored for a long time, and there have been whispers that it would be announced sometime in the next few months. However, a January report from The Elec threw some cold water on that idea, saying that the screen wasn't even set to go into production until July or August.

Google announced a raft of new artificial intelligence-powered features for customers of its cloud-computing business, as the technology giant jostles for dominance in the burgeoning field with rivals such as Microsoft and startup OpenAI. From a report: As Silicon Valley buzzes about so-called generative AI -- software that can create images, text and video based on user prompts -- Google Cloud offered a glimpse of what it's doing to keep up in the race. In a demonstration, the company showed how cloud customers will be able to use its AI tools to create presentations and sales-training documents, take notes during meetings and draft emails to colleagues. The company also made some of its underlying AI models available to developers so they can build their own applications using Google's technology.

Alphabet-owned Google also said Tuesday it had signed up a flurry of AI startups as customers for its cloud service, including Midjourney, which offers an image-generation system, and AI21, which specializes in technology known as large language models. Google is offering young AI-focused businesses $250,000 in free use of its cloud -- which provides computing horsepower and storage -- for the first year, which the company said is 2 1/2 times what it typically offers. "We believe in having a broad, vibrant partner ecosystem for AI," Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, said in an interview.

Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people, withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it has not filled and cancel some projects, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, confirming recent rumors that another round of layoffs was imminent. From a report: The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes to become more efficient this year. Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off -- or plans to lay-off -- roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year. Facebook's parent firm said it expects the latest "restructuring" efforts to start in April, and the process to impact business groups in May. Zuckerberg said that the company will also cancel "lower priority projects," adding that it "underestimated the indirect costs" associated with these initiatives.

Last summer, Elon Musk and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert announced "Coverage Above and Beyond," a joint initiative that aimed to bring Starlink satellite coverage compatible T-Mobile devices. Now, SpaceX is getting ready to begin testing its satellite-to-cellular service. Engadget reports: During a panel at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition 2023, SpaceX VP of Starlink enterprise sales Jonathan Hofeller said the company had plans to "start getting into testing" its satellite-to-cell service this year. "We're going to learn a lot by doing -- not necessarily by overanalyzing -- and getting out there, working with the telcos."

Hofeller didn't specifically say which Telco SpaceX was working with, but the timeline certainly lines up with Musk's original vision for the T-Mobile partnership. [...] Either way, the panel seemed optimistic about the future of sat-to-cell technology. Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller said that satellite cellular service has the potential to be the "biggest category in satellite," and Iridium CEO Matt Desch sees cellular satellite service as just the beginning. "Satellite should connect everything everywhere," he said at the event, imagining the technology connecting to computers, vehicles and more.

A US court has ruled (PDF) that "gig" economy giants including Uber and Lyft can continue treating their workers as independent contractors in the state of California. The BBC reports: The California appeals court found that a labor measure, known as Proposition 22, was largely constitutional. Labour groups and some workers had opposed the measure, saying it robbed them of rights like sick leave. The firms say the proposition protects other benefits such as flexibility.

The latest ruling overturns a decision made by a lower court in California in 2021, which found that Proposition 22 affected lawmakers' powers to set standards at the workplace. The state of California and a group representing Uber, Lyft and other firms appealed against the decision. On Monday, a three-judge panel at the appeals court ruled that workers could be treated as independent contractors. However it removed a clause, which put restrictions on collective bargaining by workers, from Proposition 22.

Meta's head of commerce and financial technologies Stephane Kasriel posted on Twitter that the company will sunset its NFT and digital collectibles features on Instagram and Facebook. TechCrunch reports: This short-lived product only began testing with select Instagram creators last May, plus some Facebook users in June. By July, Meta expanded NFT support on Instagram for creators in 100 countries. Less than a year later, Meta is moving on from NFTs. "We're winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses," Kasriel wrote in a Twitter thread.

A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that it is shifting its investments away from NFTs toward products like Meta Pay, as well as features that enable creators to earn money directly on Meta platforms, like its tipping feature called gifts. The company also said it is testing ways for creators to earn ad revenue on Reels. "Let me be clear: creating opportunities for creators and businesses to connect with their fans and monetize remains a priority, and we're going to focus on areas where we can make impact at scale, such as messaging and monetization opps for Reels," Kasriel wrote.

Vivaldi is a browser founded by Opera co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and launched in 2016 with a heavy focus on privacy and customizations. As someone who has worked on the internet since 1992, Tetzchner has a lot of thoughts on the state of the internet in 2023, especially when it comes to advertising. XDA spoke with Tetzchner at this year's Mobile World Congress, and it's clear to him that advertisers "stole the internet from us." From the report: For the unfamiliar, Android's Privacy Sandbox can track users by creating an offline profile on them and show relevant advertisements based on that. It's a multi-year initiative to introduce more private advertising solutions to end-users and is made possible thanks to the Topics API and FLEDGE. Its goal is to prioritize user privacy by default but still maintain the mobile ecosystem dependent on advertising to support free and ad-supported apps. This is an exclusive-to-Android solution that uses a standalone SDK, separate from the rest of the application code, with the aim of eventually replacing Ad ID. However, Tetzchner doesn't see a difference between standard tracking and companies using the Topics API.

"For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it's a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you... No, no, no, that's wrong. That's just wrong," he tells me. It's not quite where the data goes that seems to bother him the most, but what that data can be used to achieve. He mentions how this data can be used to influence how people vote, a la Cambridge Analytica. Whether that data is on your device or not is irrelevant; political advertisements will still appear regardless. "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. "The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn't be afraid of being monitored. The idea that you are collecting data to provide ads... I can understand having access to a lot of data to provide a service, but that's not the same as profiling your users."

[...] Tetzchner is deeply disheartened with the state of it. In fact, he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place. He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren't following you." He points out that paywalls have become commonplace across the internet when that wasn't the case 15 years ago. "How is it then that we needed the change that actually created that situation?" he asks. He argues that advertisements are less profitable as a whole thanks to widespread tracking. Advertisers previously paid more because they knew exactly where their advertisements were going. Now with algorithms and Google Ads, not everything is high quality, even if those algorithms try to scan pages for quality content.

Dish Network must pay $469 million for infringing two patents held by parental-control technology maker ClearPlay related to filtering material from streaming video, a jury in U.S. federal court in Utah has decided. From a report: The jury in Salt Lake City reached its decision on Friday in ClearPlay's lawsuit against Dish, finding that Dish's AutoHop feature for skipping commercials on its Hopper set-top boxes is covered by ClearPlay's patents. While jurors found that Dish's technology violated ClearPlay's patent rights, they rejected ClearPlay's contention that Dish copied its technology intentionally. A Dish spokesperson said on Monday that the company was disappointed in the jury's decision and will contest the verdict, potentially through an appeal. Representatives for ClearPlay did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said on Saturday that it would end availability of news content for Canadians on its platforms if the country's Online News Act passes in its current form. From a report: The "Online News Act," or House of Commons bill C-18, introduced in April last year laid out rules to force platforms like Meta and Alphabet's Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content. "A legislative framework that compels us to pay for links or content that we do not post, and which are not the reason the vast majority of people use our platforms, is neither sustainable nor workable," a Meta spokesperson said as reason to suspend news access in the country. Meta's move comes after Google last month started testing limited news censorship as a potential response to the bill. Canada's news media industry has asked the government for more regulation of tech companies to allow the industry to recoup financial losses it has suffered in the years as tech giants like Google and Meta steadily gain greater market share of advertising. We've watched this movie before.

Fulfilment of initial promise made for the technology remains elusive. From a report: The Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) has offered a tantalising prospect to people who want to learn but don't like to leave the house: join us 'virtually, for a postgraduate course in the metaverse.' Students signing up to WU's professional master of sustainability, entrepreneurship and technology programme can complete the entire part-time course -- attending lectures, meeting their classmates for a coffee and so on -- by just logging in via a laptop. The course -- developed in partnership with Tomorrow University of Applied Sciences, an edtech start-up based in Berlin -- is one of many examples where business schools have embraced the metaverse, 3D technology, virtual reality headsets and avatars to extend the reach of management and leadership training.

Setting up the course "provides us with greater reach, making the course more global," explains Barbara Stottinger, dean of WU's executive academy. However, she is quick to add: "Vienna is a great location so coming to campus is still pretty attractive to most of our students." And this is the problem at the heart of why many business schools have been reluctant to enter the metaverse for course tuition: studying in the real world has its advantages. Teaching the interpersonal skills of leadership and networking that are so integral to postgraduate management courses, like the MBA, is better done in person. It also avoids having to fund purchases of the hardware and software necessary for metaverse projects. Meanwhile, the metaverse has been caught in an extreme example of a 'hype cycle.' This is where wild enthusiasm about a new technology turns to widespread rejection, as its reality fails to live up to what is claimed for it.

"Meta, the parent firm of Facebook and Instagram, is working on a standalone, text-based social network app," reports the BBC.
BR> "It could rival both Twitter and its decentralised competitor, Mastodon." A spokesperson told the BBC: "We're exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates...." According to MoneyControl, the new app is codenamed P92, and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials.

Meta's app will be based on a similar framework to the one that powers Mastodon, a Twitter-like service which was launched in 2016. The new app would be decentralised — it cannot be run at the whim of a single entity, bought or sold....

It was not immediately clear when Meta would roll out the new app.

Reuters reports: General Motors is exploring uses for ChatGPT as part of its broader collaboration with Microsoft, a company executive told Reuters. "ChatGPT is going to be in everything," GM Vice President Scott Miller said in an interview last week.

The chatbot could be used to access information on how to use vehicle features normally found in an owners manual, program functions such as a garage door code or integrate schedules from a calendar, Miller said. "This shift is not just about one single capability like the evolution of voice commands, but instead means that customers can expect their future vehicles to be far more capable and fresh overall when it comes to emerging technologies," a GM spokesperson said on Friday.
More details from Engadget: According to Semafor, the digital assistant will operate differently from other chatbots like Bing Chat. GM is reportedly working on adding a "car-specific layer" on top of the large language models that power ChatGPT.

Though Kia and Hyundai represent a tenth of U.S. auto sales, the New York Times reports that "Of the nearly 11,000 cars stolen in Memphis last year — about twice as many as in 2021 — roughly a third were late-model Kias and Hyundais, according to the police."

"It doesn't take much to rip them off: just a screwdriver, a USB cord and hot-wiring know-how found in videos proliferating on social media." Many of the culprits are teenagers or young adults stealing cars for kicks or to use them for other crimes, such as robberies, the police say. More than half of the 175 people arrested and accused of car theft this year in Memphis were teenagers, who often abandon the vehicles after a joyride.... [A]uto thefts have continued to rise, even as other forms of lawbreaking have leveled out or fallen....

[T]he surge has continued, fueled in part by social media videos that show, step by step, how to steal Kias and Hyundais that are not equipped with an engine immobilizer — an electronic security device that keeps a car from being started without a key.... [Kia and Hyundai] recently issued statements saying they had fixed the problem that makes their vehicles relatively easy to steal in their latest models, and were introducing free software upgrades for vulnerable cars — about 4.5 million Kias and 3.8 million Hyundais, the federal government estimated. At the same time, the companies have shipped steering wheel locks to police departments across the country, to be provided free of charge to car owners who drive at-risk models. And executives say they are constantly monitoring TikTok and YouTube for new videos that show how to steal their vehicles, and then alerting the social media companies so those videos can be removed....

Officials say the social media-driven rise in Kia and Hyundai thefts began about two years ago in Milwaukee, and then spread nationwide. City attorneys for Seattle and Columbus recently sued the automakers for not installing anti-theft technology, and other cities, including Cleveland, Milwaukee and St. Louis, have threatened litigation.

Politico reports: Governments and businesses have spent two decades rushing to the cloud — trusting some of their most sensitive data to tech giants that promised near-limitless storage, powerful software and the knowhow to keep it safe.

Now the White House worries that the cloud is becoming a huge security vulnerability.

So it's embarking on the nation's first comprehensive plan to regulate the security practices of cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, whose servers provide data storage and computing power for customers ranging from mom-and-pop businesses to the Pentagon and CIA.... Among other steps, the Biden administration recently said it will require cloud providers to verify the identity of their users to prevent foreign hackers from renting space on U.S. cloud servers (implementing an idea first introduced in a Trump administration executive order). And last week the administration warned in its national cybersecurity strategy that more cloud regulations are coming — saying it plans to identify and close regulatory gaps over the industry....

So far, cloud providers have haven't done enough to prevent criminal and nation-state hackers from abusing their services to stage attacks within the U.S., officials argued, pointing in particular to the 2020 SolarWinds espionage campaign, in which Russian spooks avoided detection in part by renting servers from Amazon and GoDaddy. For months, they used those to slip unnoticed into at least nine federal agencies and 100 companies. That risk is only growing, said Rob Knake, the deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget. Foreign hackers have become more adept at "spinning up and rapidly spinning down" new servers, he said — in effect, moving so quickly from one rented service to the next that new leads dry up for U.S. law enforcement faster than it can trace them down.

On top of that, U.S. officials express significant frustration that cloud providers often up-charge customers to add security protections — both taking advantage of the need for such measures and leaving a security hole when companies decide not to spend the extra money. That practice complicated the federal investigations into the SolarWinds attack, because the agencies that fell victim to the Russian hacking campaign had not paid extra for Microsoft's enhanced data-logging features.... Part of what makes that difficult is that neither the government nor companies using cloud providers fully know what security protections cloud providers have in place. In a study last month on the U.S. financial sector's use of cloud services, the Treasury Department found that cloud companies provided "insufficient transparency to support due diligence and monitoring" and U.S. banks could not "fully understand the risks associated with cloud services."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When you first start messing with the command line, it can feel like there's an impermeable wall between the local space you're messing around in and the greater Internet. On your side, you've got your commands and files, and beyond the wall, there are servers, images, APIs, webpages, and more bits of useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways through that wall has been cURL, or "client URL," which turns 25 this month.

The cURL tool started as a way for programmer Daniel Stenberg to let Internet Chat Relay users quickly fetch currency exchange rates while still inside their chat window. As detailed in an archived history of the project, it was originally built off an existing command-line tool, httpget, built by Rafael Sagula. A 1.0 version was released in 1997, then changed names to urlget by 2.0, as it had added in GOPHER, FTP, and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could upload as well as download, and so version 4.0 was named cURL. Over the next few years, cURL grew to encompass nearly every Internet protocol, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for more than 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now encompasses both the command-line command itself and the libcurl library. In 2020, the project's history estimated the command and library had been installed in more than 10 billion instances worldwide.

How do you celebrate a piece of indispensable Internet architecture turning 25? Stenberg plans to host a "Zoom birthday party" at 17:00 UTC time on March 20. Double-check that time in your area: "It is within this weird period between [when] the US has switched to daylight saving time while Europe has not yet switched," Stenberg writes on his blog. Stenberg plans to sip on a 25-year Bowmore Islay single-malt Scotch, while presenting the project's history and future plans while taking questions. (A link to the Zoom call will be added to Stenberg's blog post closer to March 20.)

Cerebral has revealed it shared the private health information, including mental health assessments, of more than 3.1 million patients in the United States with advertisers and social media giants like Facebook, Google, and TikTok. From a report: The telehealth startup, which exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic after rolling lockdowns and a surge in online-only virtual health services, disclosed the security lapse in a filing with the federal government that it shared patients' personal and health information who used the app to search for therapy or other mental health care services. Cerebral said that it collected and shared names, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, IP addresses and other demographics, as well as data collected from Cerebral's online mental health self-assessment, which may have also included the services that the patient selected, assessment responses, and other associated health information.