Weekly News Recap #2

09/07/2018

1. Google lost to Microsoft buying GitHub

News about Microsoft and Google bidding for GitHub, a web-based development platform that allows it’s users to build software, manage projects, host and review code and so much more, have been circulating the web for a while now. Chris Wanstrath, GitHub founder, reportedly preferred to go with Microsoft’s bid due to his close relations with the CEO Satya Nadella.

In the last few years, GitHub has risen rapidly in popularity, with notable companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google etc. using its services. GitHub has a total of 85 million repositories hosted on it, to which 25 million developers are contributors too. The majority of the developers are intrigued to see just what Microsoft will do with GitHub. The deal will be closed later this year. The question whether Google will continue to use GitHub remains unanswered.

Source: The Verge

2. Seagate announces a mainstream SSD drive

The primary focus of Seagate has been the development of consumer hard drives and flash storage for the enterprise market. Now, the company has shown an interest in making more storage for radiation PC’s and laptops.

It is a viable storage option for a 2018 desktop but will not be running on crazy speed due to its basic SATA specs. The storage capacities will range from 250GB to 2TB. The best part of it all is Seagate’s affordable price tag! The smallest comes only to $74 and the 1TB goes out for $229.99.

Source: The Verge

3. Creating microsites that exist as URL's

An amazing new web tool called, itty bitty sites, was created. A former Google designer Nicholas Jitkoff ( now Vice President of Dropbox), that allows you to create microsites that will exist solely as URLs. Once you create the website it gives you an 8.5 x 11-inch space you can fill with any plain text, ASCII characters or emojis.

The byte limit corresponds directly to you sharing preferences. 4,000 bytes for Twitter and Slack and up to 10,000 for the Mac version of Chrome. The microsite is not physically hosted anywhere, it rather exists as a compressed URL using the Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm. It exists as an open source project on GitHub but currently has to no direct purpose. A couple of its potential uses could be to bypass Twitter’s character limit and using it as a clever alternative for domain redirecting.

Source: The Verge

4. Facebook Marketing API changes

In a recent update to Facebook development platform, apps must now go through a review process before being granted access to Facebook’s Marketing API, a tool that allows developers to build ad functionality and automation in their apps. Additionally, its’s three-tier structure is being simplified to a two-tier structure.

Any developer app which is still in “development mode” will no longer be able to retrieve public data for their API. Instead a “Login and get my Access Token” button can be used. Facebook is limiting data available from or requiring approval from Facebook events, Groups and the pages APIs. It is shutting down a large number of APIs due to low usage and is implementing these updates following the 2015 Cambridge Analytica news. An audit of 1,000 apps has been conducted which resulted in more than 200 apps being suspended.

Source: Marketing Land

5. 3D facial recognition

Novel 3D facial recognition technology can put an end to mundane log in procedures. The developed facial recognition system can recognize people despite dramatic changes in facial expressions, texture, and scale. This new system will help to improve security measures and rid us all of having to use complicated passwords that with effort and time can be hackable. A project called FR3DNet, developed by researchers at the University of Western Australia created the first prototype via facial analysis of more than 3.1 million 3D scans of more than 1,000,000 people.

Facial recognition has become highly popular in the security, surveillance and IT industries and relies on the accuracy of the software and its ability to distinguish between fake and real people. Unlike the 2D facial recognition software, the 3D has the ability to address numerous changes such as facial expressions, changes in poses, scale, etc. The data, however, is difficult to gather as the 3D facial data needs to be sourced from real subjects. As 3D cameras are becoming more widely available and affordable to the general public, the future of 3D recognition is not that far away.

Source: Indian Express