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Android Things 1.0, is the variant of Android OS designed for IoT devices by Google, and could technically boost IoT security through a unified software option for developers on constrained devices, thus ensuring critical updates.

Android Things itself is an outgrowth of a project codenamed “Brillo” which Google rolled out at I/O 2015. Google is perhaps planning a teaser at this year, Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference, as its likely to announce the full roll-out of Android Things 1.0.

While Android Things 1.0 is essentially a one-size-fits-all software option for developers of constrained devices like smart watches and other smart home devices; the idea is to provide a unified experience. And the device makers are restricted from modifying any parts of Android Things’ code, to ensure Google can flash updates to all devices running the software at any particular time.

IoT security is perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the deployment of the emerging technology, hence the inability or unwillingness of smart device makers to regularly update the software to patch security holes is the biggest part of this problem.

Google wants to guaranteed the regular update of software as a way to make IoT more attractive to the enterprise users who accounts for all the exponential growth being predicted for the market, whose need for security far outweighs any other.

Albeit, Android Things isn't Google’s only foray into IoT, as Google also has a pair of networking protocols called Thread, developed in partnership with companies like ARM and Qualcomm, and also Weave, an API layer for Thread.

For now, Android Things remains as more of an entry-level, consumer-style product, but that may change as Google is pretty serious about moving the framework as an option for device makers, and thus broadening its appeal.

Android Things 1.0: Google's framework for connected-device to boost IoT security



Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames and passwords, or credit card details (bank details), while disguising as a trustworthy entity for malicious reasons by hackers.

It's a growing threat which the social media have been at the worst hit side, but now Facebook wants to fight the menace — and so has launched a new tool to help developers protect their domains from possible phishing attacks.

While web browsers will display sites with TLS certificates as secure, but nowadays phishing websites also take advantage of this to appear safe to unsuspecting users. The phishing sites uses TLS certificates, which are used to form an encrypted connection, with the sole aim to deceive.

According to Facebook, “phishing website can look identical to the real website in an attempt to fool people into giving up their personal information.”

Facebook's alert system will be added to its Certificate Transparency Monitoring Tool, which will notify developers whenever certificates are registered for domains that are used in phishing attacks against them.

And developers can report phishing sites trying to impersonate their domains to domain registrars, browsers' vendors, or ask the certificate authorities to revoke their certificates. Additionally, it can notify subscribers of the tool for the legitimate domain by sending email, push, or on-site notifications, depending on their preference.

Facebook aims to effectively shut down bad domains that are created solely to trick people, and enable legitimate website owners to protect their sites and help prevent web surfers from falling for the scams.

Facebook’s Tool to help developers protect their domains from Phishing attacks



Instagram, the Facebook owned company contains photo of an exquisitely framed sunset which is helping Facebook train its artificial intelligence algorithms to better understand objects in images, the company announced at its annual F8 developer conference.

Facebook claims the approach is the best way to amass and train software with billions of images without requiring for human input to analyze the data or annotate it.

According to Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, “We rely almost entirely on hand-curated, human-labeled data sets. If a person hasn’t spend the time to label something specific in an image, even the most advanced computer vision systems won’t be able to identity it.”

Thus Facebook collected relevant data and use it to train its computer vision and object recognition models. And the end result is a training system that created algorithms Facebook believe beats top-of-the-line industry benchmarks.

Facebook posses extremely valuable text and image data it can use to inform its AI models, so long as that text and those images are posted as public by its users.

Albeit, most of the users may not be aware that the public data they shared are being mined to build AI systems, and not just for the already known reason of serving ads, which concerns may be farfetched, given that such data can not constitute any privacy issue.

Facebook only extract object-based data, and it’s not necessarily trying to draw inferences about user behavior from the contents of the photos.

How Facebook employ Instagram images to train artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms



Facebook has introduced a new "clear history" privacy tool to allow users to see the information about apps and websites they've interacted with or granted access to their data, and to be able to clear the information on their account.

The company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg who unveiled the privacy tool at its annual developer conference, F8 admitted that he “didn’t have clear enough answers” about data control when confronted recently to testify before the U.S. Congress.

The move is perhaps in answer to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and as part of the new measures by Facebook to put more controls of data in the hands of its users.

Zuckerberg's post announcing the tool, reads: “One thing I learned from my experience testifying in Congress is that I didn’t have clear enough answers to some of the questions about data. We’re working to make sure these controls are clear, and we will have more to come soon.”

While the privacy tool will enable users to view information about the apps and websites they’ve used and “be able to turn off having this information stored with their account”.

Facebook at the annual conference also announced other major initiatives, such as its technology to connect user's accounts with websites around the web, as well as revamped designs for user's profile pages. The event emphasize Facebook’s positive influences on society, with sessions called “amplifying youth voices to influence policy” and “using technology to solve social and environmental issues”, among other things.

What you need to know about Facebook's new privacy tool



The JavaScript toolkit Dojo 2 is the major update of the open source tool in over a decade, after it first made debut in 2004; with offerings for language utilities, UI components, and other tools for building modern web applications.

While the updated Dojo 2 leverages ECMAScript 2015 and later versions, TypeScript and other new web standards for building modern web apps with focus on interoperability and support for emerging technologies such as Intersection Observers and Web Animations.

Dojo 2 offers application-level routing focused on patterns to build applications from UI widgets, and support web components and progressive web apps. Also, it offers a reactive, virtual DOM-based widget system that includes meta providers to preserve reactivity for animations, focus, and resize events.

Other features include: container for JavaScript applications, inspired by Redux and Flux architectures.

The Dojo toolkit project is under the branch of JS Foundation, which was given birth from JQuery Foundation, and it cover projects like Dojo Toolkit and Grunt.

And JS Foundation is under the Linux Foundation and has backing from organizations like: IBM, Samsung, and Sauce Labs. So the Dojo 2 project has extensive support and input from all the communities covering the partnership.

As the foundation cultivate best practices among JavaScript application and server-side projects, it oversee such projects as the jQuery JavaScript library, the Appium testing automation framework, Dojo Toolkit, the ESLint linting utility, the JerryScript lightweight JavaScript engine, and the Mocha testing framework.

JavaScript toolkit, Dojo 2 offers support for Modern Web applications



Google has announced the beta release of Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring, a tool designed to give developers a comprehensive way of checking the status of their Kubernetes applications.

While developers ship code and operations in Google Cloud, which deals with all the managing, monitoring and troubleshooting, it sometimes make more sense to put some of these responsibilities back in the hands of the developers.

Google is bringing together logs, metrics and events across the various Kubernetes pieces including workloads containers, pods and clusters; with signals from underlying infrastructure to give developers a much more comprehensive view of their Kubernetes app.

According to JD Velásquez, product manager for Kubernetes at Google, "Stackdriver is a hosted solution from Google Cloud. It can monitor anything in Google Cloud, while Prometheus is tool you [would] use on prem. When you want single pane of glass, you can pull metrics from GCP and Prometheus on prem."

What this means is that Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring brings together a couple of key pieces including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Prometheus, a popular open source tool for monitoring Kubernetes in on-prem installations.

And with Prometheus connection, it’s taking the cloud-native ethos to prime by giving a comprehensive view across on-prem and cloud-based Kubernetes installations.

This is perhaps another example of how Google is creating products based on the ones they've created in-house to monitor their own systems, as Kubernetes was derived from Borg, an in-house container orchestration tool it uses internally to manage massive cloud applications like Google Docs.

Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring to help developers in fixing problems in their apps



Houzz Smart home trends study shows that 45% of homeowners in the U.S. have planned to install some form of technology into their homes during remodeling projects. And the technology ranges anywhere from voice activated lights to surveillance equipment or wireless speakers.

While people generally like the idea of being able to use their voice, mobile device, or tablet to turn off lights when they aren’t home, for instance. But many turn to smart home devices as a form of entertainment, too.

Nowadays, homeowners are leaning towards the world of smart technology since it allows for ease with such possibilities as voice control to switch on gadgets and so forth. And it’s pretty easy to walk into a home and say, “Alexa, turn on the lights,” instead of having to scramble for your cell phone light after digging around in your bag.

From the way smartphones and other technology have impacted our personal lives, the technology is quickly becoming more and more apparent in our houses and apartments. Find below a comprehensive Infographic on how technology is bringing ease and convenience in the home brought to you by GNP Realty Partners.

How Technology is bringing Ease and Convenience in the Home

How Technology is bringing Ease and Convenience in the Home (Infographic)



Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at the company's F8 annual conference introduced several new features coming to the Messenger and Instagram apps, which include a dating, and virtual reality capabilities.

The company looks to take on apps, like Snapchat and Twitch with nifty new features such as Watch party and social streaming, which features are available in other popular existing apps. While Watch party is akin to  Facebook Live, but the stream has only you and your friends in the live chat.

Also, Facebook is making a Join Group button to embed on websites so people can easily join from outside the social network.

The Dating feature, on the other hand matches up users who opted for the service, and will connect people by asking users to “unlock” groups or events on Facebook, which will allow users to see other “daters” who unlocked the same event or group. And the idea is that you’ll have something in common with the people to match.

You can set up a dating profile within existing Facebook account. Though messages sent between users on the dating service will not open via Messenger, rather there is a new messaging section expressly for Facebook Dating.

The dating status won’t be visible to friends or family, or show up in News Feed, as it will only appear for only the people using the service. According to Zuckerberg, “This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships, not just hook-ups.”

And perhaps, this new dating service will spur a whole new dimension of interactions on the social platform, which may ultimately benefit the users, especially the singles.

Facebook Messenger and Instagram apps getting a dating and Watch Party features



Mozilla is reported to be prepping a new advertising system in its Firefox 60 beta, which is currently served to a demography of users in the U.S., and it comes in the form of sponsored links based on personalized browsing experience.

While the promotional ads will be personalized by Firefox browser, Mozilla maintains its users personal information are private, as such it dismisses any privacy concerns.

The test is scheduled to commence on May 9, and will reach only a portion of users in the US. The retargeting is powered by Pocket, an advertising service Mozilla acquired in 2017, which allow its users to save the links of websites to revisit afterwards.

Firefox now empowered by Pocket will be able to offer same recommendations to sponsored links based on users browsing activities, albeit it will not expose the private data in the browser.

The nonprofit company had always maintained a long gap from any form of advertising to gain revenue from its numerous services and product, but this latest move is perhaps a first timer, and may be signalling a possible change in the organization's strategy.

Mozilla, however states that it will help to rewrite the rules of online marketing, with ads targeted at users' interests but never shared with advertisers, as only an aggregated total count of impressions and clicks are made available to the advertisers.

The personalized sponsored content will therefore provide value to users without jeopardizing their privacy, continued Mozilla. Adding that it is an exciting opportunity because it promises to create a more user-centered model for supporting content on the web.

Mozilla prepping to serve personalized ads on Firefox browser



Java 11 JDK will remove support for CORBA, JavaFX and Java EE (renamed Jakarta EE) modules, which is perhaps a big set back for developers as they are bound to loss some capabilities.

While Oracle released Java Development Kit 10 in March, which as per Oracle’s six-month release cycle for the standard edition of Java, means Version 11 will be due in September, though most of its underling features are already known.

The JDK 10 is short-term release, and updates are slated to end in the next six months; while JDK 11 will be a long-term support (LTS) version of Java, with LTS releases due every three years.

This means that JDK 11 will receive premier-level support from Oracle upto September 2023 and with the extended support, will continue to get patches and security alerts, until 2026.

Aside from the discontinuation of support for CORBA, Java EE, and JavaFX, the Java roadmap has revealed several new features to expect in the next release, though Oracle has not actually committed to the exact timeline the proposed features will be made available in Java.

But the following features are contained in the long-term Java roadmap which are mostly under consideration for the later versions of Java SE:

Project Loom: Is a plan that calls for adding alternative - delimited continuations and user-mode thread implementations, coupled with other constructs involving call-stack manipulation. It's main aim is to afford an alternative implementation of threads, managed by schedulers written in Java.

While this approach will improve performance and reduce the footprint, with the Java programming model of ordinary Java threads preserved.

Project Amber: This is to serve as an incubator for smaller, productivity-oriented language features that include local-variable type inference; with enhanced enums, bring expressiveness by allowing type variables in enums and performing sharper type-checking for constants.

Also it will help to boost the usability of lambda and method references.

Other features include: Panama and Valhalla, which is an incubator project for advanced Java VM and language feature candidates including value types and generic specialization. while the former is to interconnect JVM and native code, with native function from the JVM.

Java 11 JDK set to remove CORBA, Java EE, and JavaFX support

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