Brendan Eich is one of Firefox’s key figures and a web pioneer, but that’s not all he’s known for – he is the man behind a new start-up called Brave Software.
Brave Software recently released a beta version of the Brave browser – this new software can work on OS X, Windows, Android or iOS. The idea behind this browser is to shield users from intrusive ads, effectively allowing it to run much faster than its rivals.
Brendan Eich is known for bold and exciting ideas – He invented the JavaScript programming language and co-founded Mozilla which built the Firefox browser – one of the most popular browsers in the world. He left Mozilla in 2014 and started working from his new start-up, Brave Software with a team of 10, hand-picked specialists. The San Francisco-based company wants to rid the world of intrusive ads or harmful advertising all together.
The idea behind it
Brendan Eich states: "We have to disconnect the bad system, I talk about putting chlorine in the pool”. Apart from the huge speed boost Eich promises privacy protection as well. The new browser should load pages two to four times faster than rival smartphone browsers and 1.4 times faster than PC browsers.
But it’s not all smooth sailing - the Brave browser faces huge challenges such as gaining publishers support and convincing users to change their browsers. If Eich succeeds in his bold move, it could mean the end of ad blockers and improved privacy for consumers.
Currently, online ads support a huge number of free services such as Yahoo mail, Facebook and Google searches but this situation creates a problem since publishers have reasons to intrude in your personal life – their ads sell much better when publishers know details about you – or as Apple’s CEO Tim Cook states “When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product”.
The Brave browser strips out ads and in the future it plans to allow a certain ads with a limited amount of personal data shared with advertisers. The browser also removes online tracking elements which slow down browsing speed. In the end, the Brave browser wants to achieve a balance between fast browsing speed and keeping a handful of actually useful ads.
How is that possible?
It sounds like a good idea but how can it be done? The browser uses your history to see what you’re interested in and shares industry standard categories with publishers which in turn can place appropriate ads without knowing any personal information about you. Brave Software states it doesn’t want to know any information from its users. Currently the Brave browser is ads free, with a few empty patches where ads will be placed in the future.
Once it has a large number of people using it, publishers will start supplying ads based on the information Brave shares. This will be Brave’s revenue source for the time being – "We're going to have to prove ourselves to get that payment," Eich says.
Get some profit as well
Once the Brave browser has over 10 million clients, Brave Software plans to offer its consumers some revenue in return for using the product. The revenue can be used for subscriptions to pay publishers in order to remove certain or all ads. Eich and his team built their browser in Chromium – the base of Google Chrome, meaning all the security support and development will be done by Google.
But why not use Firefox as a base for the Brave browser? Eich explains "Chromium is the safe bet for us," – Chrome is much more popular among developers who want to test websites, it’s a better tested and safer choice.
It remains to be seen if the Brave browser becomes a big player like Firefox and Chrome. Currently it seems that it has all the assets necessary to do so and the revenue sharing scheme is brilliant.
Adrian Ababei / May 25'2016
Just one single gram of DNA can store 1.000.000.000 Terabytes of data for over a thousand years. Microsoft has purchased 10 million strands of synthetic DNA – these DNA molecules are called Oligonucleotides. The biology-focused company Twist supplied the strands of synthetic DNA and researchers from the University of Washington started exploring the idea of using DNA for data storage.
If Microsoft’s plan works, it will revolutionize data storage technology as we know it today. The current rate and volume of data being stored and produced every day is so fast that hard drives and servers are having a hard time coping with it – they need periodical replacement or upgrades and this in turn increases the risk of data loss or corruption.
Statistics show that by 2015, 5.4 zettabytes or 4.4 trillion gigabytes of digital data has been created and this number’s set to increase tenfold by 2020. How are we going to store 10 times the amount of data in the next 4 years? This is the question that Microsoft is planning to answer.
Microsoft wants to store data on DNA
DNA offers an enormously higher data storage density than conventional hard drives or systems – one gram of DNA can store up to 1 billion terabytes of data. DNA is also very robust meaning that any data stored on it can be readable or intact for up to 10.000 years. - That’s a bit more than your average hard drive’s life expectancy.
Twist states that all the data that exists today can be stored on as little as 20 grams of DNA. Although this may sound great, the technology is far from being ready to support our daily data and storage needs. Initial tests have gotten great results – one test demonstrated that all of the data encoded on DNA can be recovered with ease.
The American Chemical Society also recently released a statement that supports Microsoft’s finds – Data stored on DNA molecules could last up to 2000 years without being deteriorated in any way.
Adrian Ababei / May 19'2016
Do we witness the dawn of a flash-free internet? Find out about the efforts Google is putting for turning HTML5 into a default browsing experience!Google wants to use HTML5 by default for all its products, including Chrome instead of Flash by the end of the year.
Flash’s Demise
Google recently outlined a plan to promote HTML5 as the default for Chrome instead of Flash. In 2016 Flash will only be used by default for a handful of domains that still depend on it. Chrome will run on HTML5 by default if it’s possible, but if Flash is required for a certain website the user will be asked if it’s allowed to run or not.
Flash has been losing ground to HTML5 for many years now. Considering the fact that Flash is a security nightmare riddled with vulnerabilities, it was only a matter of time until companies went in favour of HTML5. Chrome and Flash have always had a complicated relationship in the past.
Flash is currently being included in Google’s Chrome browser by default but that will surely change in the future. Back in September 2015 Chrome started automatically pausing non-essential Flash content such as animations and ads. Nowadays Google wants to pause all Flash content on websites you visit.
Google’s Proposal
The new Google proposal for HTML5 is finally here:
Flash Player comes in a bundle with Google Chrome but it’s presence is not advertised as before in Navigator.Plugins() and Navigator.MimeTypes().
If a site is able to run HTML5 smoothly, it will become the default experience
When users visit a site that requires Flash Player a pop-up will appear at the top of the page, asking permission to run it
If the user accepts, Chrome will advertise the presence of Flash Player before refreshing the page.
Chrome will remember the user’s setting for other visits as well, so just one approval is needed.
Exceptions Exist
A list of top 10 used sites are whitelisted – for these sites users don’t need to approve Flash to run. The whitelist is meant to avoid over-prompting and make the transition to HTML5 smoother. The whitelisted websites will most likely include Mail.ru, Amazon.com, Twitch.tv, OK.ru, Yandex.ru, Live.com, VK.com, Yahoo.com, Facebook.com and Youtube.com. The white list itself will be updated periodically in order to ad or remove websites.
If users allow Flash to run on any website, Google will simply store the preference and refresh the page. On the other hand, if a website directs users to download Flash, Google Chrome will present an infobar with “Allow Flash Player…” before directing users to the prompt.
Google will also add policy controls such as a setting to “Allow Sites to ask to run Flash”, “Allow Sites…” and “Never run Flash content”. With this system users are able to manage their preferences for each website.
Pulling the plug
Google has been at the forefront of killing Flash. Back in 2015, YouTube opted for HTML5 videos by default and in February of the same year Google began to automatically convert Flash-based ads to HTML5. Google wants all Flash display ads gone by 1 January 2017.
For some, Flash’s demise couldn’t come to soon – both for security and performance reasons. Despite Google’s strong opposition towards Flash, it was Adobe that actually pulled the plug back in November 2011 when the company withdrew support for Flash Player on mobile devices.
Even with tech giants pushing for the total elimination of Flash Players, it will likely take many years before we can finally have a Flash-free internet.
Adrian Ababei / May 17'2016
Opera, the popular web browser is launching a VPN or virtual private network client for iPads and iPhones. The launch came just three weeks after the same feature was announced for the desktop browser.
Opera designed the app to be “especially relevant on campuses and workplaces” where Wi-Fi provided by certain institutions or companies has limited access to “social-media and video streaming websites”.
You can also set your app to route your internet connection through another country in order to have access to geo-blocked content. The app also blocks trackers and ads.
When the VPN/proxy version first appeared a few weeks ago it only supported three virtual locations – Germany, Canada and the US. With the new launch for iOS, you can now pretend to live in the Netherlands or Singapore as well. The new launch also boasts quite a few supported languages including Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Indonesian, German, French, Arabic and of course English. The Opera VPN app is set to “off” by default, so you need to turn it on manually. The two other options to block ads and block trackers can also be turned on from the “Settings” menu.
Although many VPNs were already available to users, most of these services required payment to unlock certain features. Opera offers free and unlimited access in a bid to gain traction with the online community.
Why would Opera go through the trouble of creating a new VPN app if it’s given for free? SurfEasy seems to think that Opera “collects anonymous data about how people use their mobile devices” and sells it to third parties who are “interested in better understanding the mobile ecosystem and how it’s evolving.” Opera is also likely to place ads in the app itself in the near future.
If you’re paranoid about being tracked online, you’ll feel much safer by using an app that charges a monthly fee. Individuals who are simply seeking to access websites or content that’s banned in their country, campus or workplace will clearly benefit from Opera VPN. - “With the new Opera VPN app, we help people to break down the barriers of the Web and enjoy the Internet like it should be,” said Chris Houston, president of Opera division SurfEasy. Opera’s upgrade efforts are not limited to VPNs though, as the company plans to create a VPN for Android as well.
Adrian Ababei / May 13'2016
The European Commission on Wednesday charged that Google breached EU antitrust rules by seeking to maintain and expand the dominance of its Android operating system. "A competitive mobile Internet sector is increasingly important for consumers and businesses in Europe," said the EC's antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager. "Based on our investigation thus far," she continued, "we believe that Google's behavior denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players, in breach of EU antitrust rules."
Throttling Competition
In its statement of objections, the commission alleged Google violated EU antitrust rules in the following ways: • Requiring manufacturers to preinstall Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps; • Preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on Android open source code; and • Giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively preinstall Google Search on their devices. Google's business practices may lead to a further consolidation of the company's dominant position in general Internet search services, the commission noted. Those practices may affect the ability of other mobile browsers to compete with Google Chrome. They hinder the development of operating systems based on Android open source code and the opportunities they would offer for the development of new apps and services, the commission said.
Internet Explorer Redux
The commission's action is a response to complaints it has received from Google's competitors in Europe. In 2013, FairSearch Europe, a group that includes Oracle and Nokia, filed a complaint with the EC about Android. In 2014, Aptoide also filed a complaint. Consumer Watchdog is another group supporting an investigation into Google's Android dominance. "This is the same kind of thing that Microsoft did when it bundled its browser in with its operating system," said John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project. "While Google makes Android freely available, it's got strings that come with it that unfairly favor Google's apps if you're going to use the Android software," he told the E-Commerce Times. "Consumers can go and find other apps and install them," Simpson added, "but that gives Google a leg up on Android devices."
Unfortunate Action
Google is not stifling the Android marketplace, according to Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. "This is an unfortunate action because it does not seem like there has been any consumer harm from the allegations and there is strong competition in the mobile OS environment," he told the E-Commerce Times. "It is hard to see how Google can lock out any competitors since the switching costs of installing a new app are so minimal -- 30 seconds to download and install a rival app," Castro said. One reason Android enjoys widespread popularity is its openness, he explained, which allows for experimentation while also providing standardized features across platforms for users. "It would be unfortunate if the EU punishes Google for actions it takes that create better consumer experiences because it believes these actions are anticompetitive," Castro said. "This would create a risk," he continued, "that tech companies would design products to meet arcane competition regulations rather than consumer needs."
U.S. Probe
Since the Europeans announced their initial probe into Google's Android monopoly last year, there have been murmurs of a similar investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In September, for example, Bloomberg reported that the FTC had reached an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether or not Google was stifling access to Android by its competitors. That wouldn't be the first time the FTC probed Google. It looked into Google's search dominance in 2011 and 2012. That investigation ended in 2013 with Google changing some of its business practices. However, last year The Wall Street Journal reported that the commissionignored the advice of key staffers to sue Google because they believed it was doing harm to consumers and innovation. "The FTC completely blew its investigation on the search monopoly," Consumer Watch's Simpson said. "They completely failed to do their job there." In 2014, Google spent US$16.8 million on lobbying in Washington, he added. "You don't spend money like drunken sailors on lobbying unless you see results."
Source: http://www.technewsworld.com
Adrian Ababei / Apr 27'2016
If you’ve been following web development over the past few years, you will have noticed how fast it has evolved. The understanding of PHP and JavaScript has shifted, new frameworks have emerged, and the package manager Composer provides an easy way to integrate different components into applications. All this has lead to a new generation of content management systems that are built on modern principles, shed old ballast and simplify the lives of both developers and end users. One of them is Pagekit, an outstanding new CMS developed by YOOtheme, a company that has been creating themes and extensions for Joomla and WordPress since 2007.
Pagekit is a modular and lightweight CMS built with Vue.js and Symfony components. Its focus lies on being intuitive for end-users on the one hand and a modern codebase that provides powerful tools for developers on the other. Apart from menus, pages, and widgets, Pagekit features a powerful user and permission system as well as a blogging extension, including a sophisticated comment function. Since the release of its first Alpha version in 2014, Pagekit has been supported by a rapidly growing community on Github, so that in spring 2016 it finally leaves its beta phase and hits the screens.
Pagekit’s User Interface
Pagekit’s simple user interface lets even beginners start their first website without any struggles. The administration is inspired by Google’s Material Design guidelines and provides a clean, intuitive and mobile-friendly experience for end users, featuring link and media pickers and a lot of one-click functionalities. It is limited to the essentials without compromising features that CMS users have come to expect. When logging into your Pagekit website, the first thing you’ll see is the Dashboard. It provides access to all areas of the administration and allows you to install useful widgets, like Google Analytics, to get an overview of your site’s activity and visitor data. The Dashboard leads you to the hierarchical Site Tree view. Here you can organize all your pages, menus, and widgets in a unified drag and drop interface. It is the central place to manage content in Pagekit and drastically simplifies creating websites. You can write the content of static pages, widgets and the built-in blog extension using a wonderful HTML & Markdown editor. It features syntax highlighting as well as real-time preview and has access to Pagekit’s file manager to upload media right into your content.
The Pagekit Marketplace
Pagekit features a built-in Marketplace. Users can install themes and extensions in one click without having to leave the administration area while developers have the chance to distribute their products to a global community. Since extensibility is one of the core ideas of Pagekit, its modular architecture makes it such a great base for interested developers. Right now, four official themes are at hand, including One, Pagekit’s default theme. The Marketplace also delivers a handful of in-house extensions: Google Analytics, a syntax highlighter, TinyMCE and the pre-bundled Blog. A number of third party themes and extensions are already available as well, for example, a form builder, a portfolio, and social media extensions. To help developers create their products, the Marketplace offers blueprints for themes and extensions. The idea is for the Marketplace to become a thriving theme and extension ecosystem.
The Modern Architecture of Pagekit
Pagekit is best friends with Vue.js, the new hot JavaScript framework you may already have heard of. Vue offers functionalities to easily build interactive interfaces. It takes care of updating models and views on the client via its two-way data binding. But there is more to it than having nice interactive views. By utilizing Vue’s concept of web components, we can build a client library for reusable components, like the media picker that can be used from any extension. What looks good on the interface level, should also extend to a strong foundation. Since extensibility is one of the core ideas of Pagekit, the team explored what “modularity” really means. On the code level, nearly everything is a Module object: a theme, an extension, a widget and the core functionality itself. This keeps code complexity to a minimum, as developers can work with the same concept in many different places. Pagekit is extended through themes and extensions. They can make a small or big change to Pagekit’s functionality as well as make it look beautiful. The CMS manages them using the power of Composer. Install packages right from the browser, using the command line or by requiring them in your project definition. No need to distribute the package dependencies with your extensions. Pagekit will get and share the required libraries during the package’s installation.
Pagekit Community and Resources
Pagekit is an open source project and published under MIT license. So if you want to get your hands dirty, head over to Github and take a look under Pagekit’s hood. Everyone is invited to contribute. A number of useful resources are already available to help you find your way around Pagekit and even to start developing your themes and extensions.
There are a lot of CMSes out there that suit different needs. But we suggest you give the new kid on the block a try. Its lightness, simplicity, and beautiful Material Deign user interface make working with Pagekit a true delight. It provides great tools for developers, and its modular architecture will make you itch to start creating cool extensions. We see a bright future ahead for Pagekit.
Source: https://speckyboy.com
Adrian Ababei / Apr 21'2016
Here’s something new: Microsoft Build announced that it is bringing GNU project’s Bash shell to Windows. Bash or Bourne Again Shell has been a standard OS X on many Linux distribution systems but the default terminal for Windows developers is PowerShell, produced by Microsoft itself.
This means that developers will be able to write their .sh Bash scripts on Windows as well. The new system will work through a Linux subsystem in Windows 10 that Microsoft worked on with Canonical.
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth states: “The native availability of a full Ubuntu environment on Windows, without virtualization or emulation, is a milestone that defies convention and a gateway to fascinatingly unfamiliar territory,”
“In our journey to bring free software to the widest possible audience, this is not a moment we could have predicted. Nevertheless we are delighted to stand behind Ubuntu for Windows, committed to addressing the needs of Windows developers exploring Linux in this amazing new way, and excited at the possibilities heralded by this unexpected turn of events.”, he adds.
It gets better
The idea behind moving the Bash shell to Windows 10 is to make Windows a better operating system for developers who want to target other platforms than Microsoft’s.
Satya Nadella, the new CEO of Microsoft is actively pushing for projects that target all platforms and developers, not just Windows. A few years ago it was unthinkable for Microsoft to work together with a rival operating system such as Linux but now the company offers Linux support on Azure and plans to bring SQL Server to Linux in the near future as well.
Bash will become available with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update but Windows Insiders can try it out before that. Microsoft is planning to bring other shells to Windows as well, which is a great thing for developers worldwide.
Adrian Ababei / Apr 19'2016
Up until now, finding open source code has been a real hassle for professional developers and beginners alike – Cocycles is here to fix that issue with a simple solution.
Cocycles launched its very own code search engine specifically built to help developers find open source code sorted by functionality. Open source code is being sorted and neatly organized according to functionality – all you need to do is describe what you want the code to do and Ocycles will find it for you.
The vast sea of open source code
GitHub reports that the amount of open source code being written doubles itself yearly, with over 31 million different repositories currently in existence. Unfortunately enough, 98% of the code written becomes obsolete within a year from being written.
Until now it was impossible to know exactly what open source code was already written and where to find it. Developers had the arduous task of searching for packages of code and then looking through libraries to find the bits and pieces they needed for their projects. But what happens when a developer just needs a single piece of code that does something – a simple JavaScript function that swaps two elements in an array? It was impossible to search through and sort the vast sea of open source code.
Searching for open source code made easy
Cocycles is a search engine specifically designed for code. Not only text or libraries but code. Users need to describe the desired functionality and with just a click of the button matching bits and pieces from open source code will appear like magic. The code itself is stored and organized by functionality, so the search engine understands what every piece of code does. NLP algorithms enable Cocycles to understand the developers’ natural language and translate these queries into code functionality. After that, the described functionality is matched to the code pieces’ from across the open source.
For example, if you search for code that swaps two elements in an array, you just need to search for „swap elements” and you’ll find different open source code bits that do precisely that.
Cocycles does not only provide interactive views of the full code implementation but it will also provide the original documents plus real usage examples and meta-data.
Cocycles is able to generate a snippet containing all functions and dependencies within one line of code – this allows devs to use it as it is.
Another feature of this code search engine includes „Cocycles Immediate” which is similar to Google’s „I’m feeling lucky” – it will instantly provide a view of the data related to your search.
Cocycles currently supports JavaScript but the developers are planning to enable it to support other languages as well.
Cocycles is and always be free or all developers. We hope it will have a good influence in the world of open source development.
Adrian Ababei / Apr 11'2016
When Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were in London discussing the new language. Sources said that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android, while Facebook and Uber are also considering Swift. Google’s Android operating system now supports Java as its first-class language, and sources say Swift is not meant to replace Java, at least initially. While the ongoing litigation with Oracle is likely cause for concern, sources say Google considers Swift to have a broader “upside” than Java. Swift is open source, which means Google could adopt it for Android without changing its own open source mobile structure.
Could Google do it?
Born at Apple as a replacement to Objective C, Swift quickly found favor with developers as an easy-to-write language that shed much of the verbosity and clumsy parameters other languages have. Swift can’t be copy-pasted for any platform, though. Specifically, Android would need a runtime for Swift — and that’s just for starters. Google would also have to make its entire standard library Swift-ready, and support the language in APIs and SDKs. Some low-level Android APIs are C++, which Swift can not currently bridge to. Those would have to be re-written. Using Swift for Android is not impossible, though. Late last year, developer Romain Goyet toyed with Swift for Android — and had some success. While that project was completed well ahead of Swift being open source, it nonetheless proved that it can be done. That project used the Android NDK, which allows other languages to be loosely implemented into Android. With an open source Swift and support from Google, Android apps wouldn’t require that toolkit. All told, Google would have to effectively recreate its efforts with Java — for Swift.
Facebook and Uber
Facebook’s interest in Swift appears to be completely founded in technological advancement. A benefit of Swift is that it can serve as both a forward-facing language as well as a server-side one. For a product like Facebook, that’s beneficial; apps and servers can speak to one another seamlessly, and it potentially gives the company a wider scope to write APIs for services. And work may have already begun. A Github pull request in the Swift repository named ‘Port to Android’ was made by a Facebook employee. It’s not clear if his work was official Facebook business or not, though we have confirmed Facebook is already working with Swift internally — it’s just not known how thoroughly. Uber’s road to Swift is probably a bit cleaner than either Google or Facebook.
When could a move to Swift happen?
We think that this won’t happen anytime soon, mainly because of Android. But Swift is quickly finding its way. Several studies suggest it’s one of the fastest growing languages around, and has blown up since going open source (GitHubtells The Next Web the language is currently its 11th most popular). Demand for developers who know Swift is also exploding, which could be all the indication these three companies need to at least explore using Swift more thoroughly. Google’s onboarding for Swift would be long; it essentially has to rewrite every Android service, app and API. Google would also have to spearhead Swift support for Android — which is still only being poked and prodded at by clever developers in the Swift community. In a way, Google has already begun moving away from bits of Oracle-flavored Java. It’s now using the Open JDK for Android rather than the proprietary Java API, and may be considering a post-Java life altogether. Talks in London were said to be exploratory; Google is not yet pushing to move on from Java. While it would be a big undertaking, Swift is meant for speed and safety, and Swift’s roadmap suggests it won’t be quite as difficult to use it for other platforms in the future, specifically when it comes to C++. Facebook and Uber face similarly daunting tasks when it comes to using Swift throughout, but can –and should — wait for Google to shoulder the load with Android. If the use of Swift is going to be as deep as our sources indicate (that is, all companies want to be using it for server side and forward-facing use cases), Android support is integral. Moving to Swift for any of the companies also makes little sense unless it’s a thorough re-do, but it’s probably not quite as hard as it sounds. Services like Perfectprove that server-side Swift is ready, and it’s worth considering that Facebook’s engineers (perhaps from the Parse team) may already be working on this. IBM is also working to make Swift ready for server-side functions. But don’t expect Google, Facebook or Uber to announce Swift-y plans anytime soon. Facebook and Google both have developer conferences on the horizon, and there’s no indication that Swift will play a major part at either.
Source: http://thenextweb.com
Adrian Ababei / Apr 08'2016