Tim Anderson

Microsoft has plowed $1bn into OpenAI, a San-Francisco-company that is working on artificial general intelligence (AGI). OpenAI is a nonprofit-for-profit organisation founded in October 2015 by investors including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the latter now CEO of OpenAI. According to a statement today, the two companies have …

Some early adopters of the Raspberry Pi 4, released on 24 June, are running into heat issues, especially with the official Pi 4 case making no provision for a heatsink or fan. The Raspberry Pi 4 has a 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 CPU, for approximately three times the performance of the previous model. That …

Microsoft's TypeScript 3.6 beta, pushed out just before the weekend, is "intended to be feature complete", according to program manager Daniel Rosenwasser. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript designed to make it more suitable for building large applications. Newly released programming language rankings from analysts …

Microsoft introduced new licensing plans for its PowerApps platform at the Inspire partner conference this week to accommodate the increasing capabilities available. Microsoft's PowerApps is growing apace, certainly in terms of the effort the company is putting into extending it. It is one of three components in what the …

Microsoft has demonstrated its ElectionGuard electronic vote system at the Aspen Security Forum under way in Colorado and warned that nearly 10,000 of its customers have been targeted by nation-state attacks. ElectionGuard aims to enable end-to-end verification of voting. Voters receive a tracking code and can check via a web …

Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) is waxing lyrical about the risks inherent in C and C++ coding, arguing it may be time to dump "unsafe legacy languages" and shift to more modern, safer ones. The Redmond-based biz has long been a C++ shop when it comes to the programming that matters most to the company – the Windows …

Microsoft had to consider businesses' addiction to Internet Explorer 11 in its roadmap for Edge Enterprise, the business aspect of its new web browser based on Google's Chromium project. Group program manager Sean Lyndersay and senior program manager Colleen Williams said of the roadmap, rolled out yesterday, that "one of the …

The Go language will not be adding a "try" keyword in the next major version, despite this being a major part of what was proposed for version 1.14. Go, an open source language developed by Google, features static typing and native code compilation. It is around the 15th most popular language according to the Redmonk rankings …

Amazon Web Services has gone live with an upgrade of its CloudWatch Events service, EventBridge, which has integration with third-party SaaS applications built in. EventBridge is not really a new service, but rather an enhancement of an existing one. CloudWatch Events has been around since early 2016 and was designed to let …

IBM is the latest to pile into devops darling Kubernetes, pulling its Kabanero project out the bag at the O’Reilly Open Source Software conference, currently under way in Portland, Oregon. Kubernetes, invented by Google and affectionately known as K8s, is today's platform of choice for orchestrating microservices. It is not a …

InspireMicrosoft is set to launch something called the Business Applications ISV Connect Program at its Inspire conference in Las Vegas next week. This program will, essentially, strong-arm makers of business applications into getting their software reviewed for quality and security before it can appear on Redmond's online AppSource …

UpdatedMicrosoft's Toby Richards, General Manager of programmes within the Commercial Partner organisation, has explained the company's removal of free licences from the benefits assigned to resellers. Richards presented an "Ask me anything" (AMA) session yesterday on the subject of "Partner investments and incentives" – and there …

Apple has pushed a silent update to Macs, disabling the hidden web server installed by the popular Zoom web-conferencing software. A security researcher this week went public with his finding that the mechanism used to bypass a Safari prompt before entering a Zoom conference was a hidden local web server. Jonathan Leitschuh …

AnalysisAmazon Web Services has announced the general availability of PostgreSQL on its Aurora Serverless platform. Aurora is part of AWS's managed relational database service. An Aurora database can span multiple regions for low latency reads. The compute aspect of Aurora is separate from its storage, which is always spread over …

Mozilla's new Firefox, 68, is out, and among other things it fixes an annoyance in the "Dark mode" theme where the toolbar in Reader mode retained a "light" appearance. In the Windows, macOS, Linux and iOS release, the browser-maker is also surfacing its "Recommended Extensions" scheme, where editorial staff identify add-ons …

Microsoft's new code libraries for programming its Azure cloud address a significant problem for developers: the inconsistency between the huge numbers of supporting libraries. The issue has arisen after the rapid development of new features on Azure over a stretch of several years. The new code libraries have started with …

IBM has officially completed the acquisition of Red Hat for around $34bn. The deal was made public in October 2018. The official spin is that it is all about hybrid cloud. Red Hat is a specialist in packaging and supporting open-source software for enterprises, including OpenStack cloud computing, OpenShift container and …

More than 2,500 resellers and integrators have signed a petition opposing Microsoft's intention to remove free software licences granted to members of the channel to run their business. The changes are described here: Effective July 1, 2020, we will retire the internal use rights (IUR) association with the product licenses …

UpdatedZoom Video Communications, whose web conferencing service is used by millions, is under fire for installing a hidden web server on Macs in order to bypass user consent when joining a meeting. Researcher Jonathan Leitschuh, a member of the security team at Gradle Inc, investigated how the Zoom client opens automatically when …

Hands OnWhile it's fair to say Amazon Web Services' upgraded DeepLens AI camera is essentially a mini PC with a cloud-connected HD camera, it also has many slick features. The gear is now available in Europe – the first version was only available in the US. The new edition is now in seven new countries, including the UK. DeepLens is …

Microsoft has brought a bunch of enhancements with version 1.36 of Visual Studio Code, its popular open-source editor. VS Code's updated Java installer will now set up a Java development environment for you, using a JDK (Java Development Kit) from AdoptOpenJDK rather than Oracle's more encumbered version. It will also install …

Axel Rietschin, kernel engineer at Microsoft, has claimed that ReactOS, an open source operating system intended to be binary-compatible with Windows, is "a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel that Microsoft licensed to universities." Rietschin, who is currently "Senior Software Engineer (Windows Base Kernel, Container …

A couple of days ago and without fanfare Google went live with Fuchsia.dev, a developer site for its new operating system, currently called the Fuchsia Project. What is Fuchsia? The first the general public knew about it was when a GitHub project appeared in August 2016 (though the repository has since moved to Google's own …

Hands OnTexas software house Embarcadero Technologies has said it will license FmxLinux for Delphi, allowing developers to compile desktop applications for 64-bit Linux. FmxLinux is a toolchain for compiling Linux desktop applications using Embarcadero’s Linux compiler for Delphi, which is also part of the RAD Studio bundle. FmxLinux …

Mozilla has announced what is currently called Firefox Preview (codename Firefox Fenix), a new mobile web browser for Android. Firefox Preview brings together two Mozilla projects. GeckoView is a browser engine and an alternative to WebView for Android, a built-in component based on Chromium’s “Blink” engine. Mozilla Android …