News

Atlas Robot - The Next Generation   Wednesday 24 February

An impressive video released by Boston Dynamics, showcases the capabilities of the new generation of the Atlas robots. Untethered at last, Atlas is now confident not only in its ability to move but also to recover from a fall.

Kratos Runs Lambda On Multiple Clouds   Wednesday 24 February

A new project is underway that will let companies run AWS Lambda functions on non-Amazon clouds.

Mozilla Kills Shumway Its Flash Replacement   Wednesday 24 February

Mozilla seems to have retired Shumway. There hasn't been an official announcement, but we have to infer that as it is from the fact that it is now in the Firefox Graveyard. Does this matter?

Spark Announcements   Tuesday 23 February

Details of the next version of Apache Spark, a free community edition of the Databricks cloud-based big data platform and Dashboards, a reporting front end, have all been announced.

Go 1.6 Released   Tuesday 23 February

The latest version of Google Go has been released with support for HTTP/2. Coming six months after Go 1.5, which had more dramatic changes, Version 1.6 contains more incremental improvements. 

WorldWide Telescope Moves On   Tuesday 23 February

WorldWide Telescope, a set of applications that display astronomical data allowing visual navigation through a three-dimensional Universe, has been formally adopted by the American Astronomical Association.

Sense From Silk Labs   Monday 22 February

Sense is a device that sets out to be the eyes, ears, and brain of your modern household. The first product from Silk Labs, it is available for pre-order on Kickstarter and has already exceeded its $100,000 funding goal.

Google's Cloud Vision AI - Now We Can All Play   Monday 22 February

Google announced Cloud Vision at the end of 2015, but it was in limited preview until now. Now, not only can we get our hands on the beta, we have inital pricing to work out if it is worth it. 

AI Video Winners Announced   Sunday 21 February

So who needs the Oscars... The winners of the AAAI video competition have been announced and you could say who needs AI as we picked one of the winners without the help of any advanced data processing.

Yahoo In Retrenchment Again   Saturday 20 February

Yahoo held its annual Mobile Developer Conference yesterday and unveiled an updated version of Flurry, its mobile analytics platform . However delegates were warned of a gloomy outlook for mobile in the coming year which can be considered a reflection of Yahoo's own troubled future.

Google Open Sources iOS Testing Framework   Friday 19 February

Google has released EarlGrey, a native iOS UI automation test framework that enables you to write clear, concise tests, as an open-source project on GitHub under the Apache license.

Kotlin JVM 1.0   Friday 19 February

Jetbrains has released Kotlin 1.0, its open source general purpose programming language for JVM and Java. 

Vulnerability Revealed In GNU C Library   Thursday 18 February

A patch has been released for a buffer overflow bug that was discovered in the glibc DNS client side resolver. The vulnerability potentially affects hundreds of thousands of internet connected devices and publicizing it increases the risk!

IBM Watson AI X-PRIZE Announced   Thursday 18 February

A $5 million competition was announced at TED2016. Spanning 2017 to 2020 it is up to participating teams to decide what challenges they want to address using artificial intelligence.

Atom 1.5 Released   Thursday 18 February

Github has released a stable version of its Atom open-source text editor with support for more operating systems. Alongside Atom 1.5, the developers have also launched a beta of Atom 1.6.

The Core

Locating Bugs In ChakraCore   Monday 22 February

Microsoft recently open-sourced ChakraCore, the key component of the high performance JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge and Windows applications written in HTML/CSS/JS. This prompted PVS-Studio to apply its static analysis tool to the ChakraCore source code, revealing some interesting code fragments as a result.

Babbage's Bag

Inside Bitcoin - The Block Chain   Friday 19 February

Bitcoin is a currency that exists entirely in software and is under the control of no central authority. What is really important about Bitcoin, however, are the algorithms that make it all work. We explain the way the Block Chain works.