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Open Source

Reactions To Apple's Plans To Open Source Swift 246

itwbennett writes: At Apple's WWDC 2015 event yesterday, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, announced that the company planned to open source the Swift language. Reaction to this announcement so far has sounded more or less like this: Deafening applause with undertones of "we'll see." As a commenter on this Ars Technica story points out, "Their [Apple's] previous open-source efforts (Darwin, WebKit, etc) have generally tended to be far more towards the Google style of closed development followed by a public source dump." Simon Phipps, the former director of OSI, also expressed some reservations, saying, "While every additional piece of open source software extends the opportunities for software freedom, the critical question for a programming language is less whether it is itself open source and more whether it's feasible to make open source software with it. Programming languages are glue for SDKs, APIs and libraries. The real value of Swift will be whether it can realistically be used anywhere but Apple's walled garden."

Submission + - Twitter adds "report dox" option

AmiMoJo writes: Twitter announced that its abuse-report system, which was recently refined to simplify and shorten the reporting process, has now expanded to allow users to report content such as self-harm incidents and "the sharing of private and confidential information" (aka doxing). The announcement, posted by Twitter Vice President of User Services Tina Bhatnagar, explained that December's report-process update was met with a "tripling" of the site's abuse support staff, which has led to a quintupling of abuse report processing. Chat logs recently revealed how Twitter is used by small groups to create vast harassment campaigns, thanks to sock puppet account and relative anonymity.

Comment Re:it contradicts the definition (Score 5, Informative) 209

We use coverity where I work on proprietary code and part of their service is to report, anonymously obviously, the defect count, type and lines of code etc back to coverity if you want to. Via this they can get an idea of the defects found using their tool over a very large code base.
Google

Submission + - Googling for Friendy Flights (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: "British Airways wants to be the airline where everybody knows your name. The idea behind the 'Know Me' program is that by using Google Images to ID passengers, they'll be able to recreate the 'feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant,' Jo Boswell, head of customer analysis at BA told the London Evening Standard. But the more privacy minded among us know that the airline could end up seeing a lot more than your face."
IT

Submission + - IT salaries and hiring are up - but just to 2008 levels (infoworld.com)

tsamsoniw writes: "A mid-year salary survey has a mix of good and bad news for IT professionals: The good news, hiring is slowly increasing as companies bring more IT operations back in house and salaries are creeping up a bit. But compensation (including benefits) are just now reaching 2008 levels — and hiring will remain soft, at least until the presidential election is over."

Comment That is a debug unit (Score 5, Informative) 337

I think most of you are missing the fact that this is running on a debug unit which already has the capability to run unsigned code and code off of hard drives with no restrictions. The USB dongle has nothing to do with that, until this can be show running on a non-debug unit this is very bogus.
Software

AACS Vows to Fight Bloggers 601

Jonas Wisser writes "The BBC is carrying the story that AACS has promised to take action against those who have posted the AACS crack online. Michael Ayers, chairperson of AACS, noted that the cracked key has now been revoked, and went on to say, 'Some people clearly think it's a First Amendment issue. There is no intent from us to interfere with people's right to discuss copy protection. We respect free speech.' The AACS website tells consumers how they can 'continue to enjoy content protected by AACS' by 'refreshing the encryption keys associated with their HD DVD and Blu-ray software players.'"

Comment Skype details (Score 2, Informative) 294

Before anyone goes on about how MS will end up running everything with a proprietary protocol that noone else can interoperate with you should ask about Skype itself. You do realise that Skype is simply a propietary hacked version of SIP? We looked at what it does here (since we are in a similar line of business) and it is scary how convoluted they have tried to make it so that nobody else can provide service/equipment that interoperates with them. They are becoming a closed exclusive network that no other provider can operate with. Yes you can go out to the public network but what if you want to call someone on Skype? You have to use Skype. Why should I be forced to use a certain VoIP provider just to call another subscriber on that network? Anyway just my 2c given where I work have looked at a lot of the details of how these work. Also FYI MS messenger uses SIP to do it's VoIP side communication before you ask, i.e. non-proprietary.

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