Facial recognition technology has been taking it on the chin lately (pardon the pun). Earlier this week, the BBC reported that a UK court ruled the use of the technology by British police violated human rights and data protection laws in that country. A week before that, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago unveiled Fawkes, an algorithm and software tool that makes pixel-level changes to your image that are invisible to the human eye, but effectively mask you from the current crop of facial recognition applications. And back in July, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were sued over claims they used photos of individuals to train their facial recognition software without getting prior consent, which violated an Illinois biometric privacy statute. (Facebook had already settled a class-action claim that it also violated that law.)
More
Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 20200 comments
Oracle's Java Platform Group created a March Madness-style bracket to mark Java's 25th anniversary, substituting JEPs for the college basketball teams and using Twitter polls to determine the winners of the matchups.
The "Best of the JDK Feature Face-Off" concluded last week, with JDK Mission Control edging Records in the final round.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on July 16, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation has been busy since the organization announced its move to Belgium last month. It announced the first milestone release of Jakarta EE 9, and published a white paper about open source in Europe and it just posted the results of its 2020 Jakarta EE Developer Survey.
Based on the responses of several thousand enterprise developer, the survey provides a fascinating look at the growth of open source enterprise Java, as well as some details on what developer interest in things like microservices and platforms.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 25, 20200 comments
Oracle kicked off its celebration of Java's 25th anniversary, which arrived officially on Saturday, with ... you guessed it: online content. It's disappointing not to be able to celebrate the language and platform that is, let's face it, running world IRL. But Big Red mounted an able effort on its "Moved-by-Java" site with inspiring personal stories from its Java team and the larger Java community, many of which are genuinely inspiring. If you haven't already, be sure to check it out.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on May 29, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation is moving its headquarters to Belgium, the organization has just revealed. One of the world's leading open-source software foundations, steward of the Eclipse IDE, enterprise Java, and the Eclipse MicroProfile, and the heart of a global ecosystem of developers, companies, and public sector entities, is pulling up stakes and heading for Brussels.
Well, figuratively speaking.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on May 13, 20200 comments
Red Hat has been making a lot of news over the past two weeks, with product and services announcements fairly gushing from the Red Hat Summit online event last week, as well as IBM's online Think event, which is wrapping up today.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on May 7, 20200 comments
Now that you're working from home and not spending all that time on a daily commute or regular showers, instead of binge-watching back episodes of Rick and Morty, you might want to use that time to up-level your skillset with some online education -- much of which is suddenly very affordable.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 23, 20200 comments
Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic: increased demand for COBOL programmers. The need seems to be particularly acute among states whose unemployment systems were originally written in the decades-old language -- systems suddenly tasked with processing a record number of unemployment claims. Estimates vary, but it's safe to say that there are a couple hundred billion lines of COBOL code currently in use. And it seems to be gumming up the works.
This news should provoke a bit of déjà vu in more than a few IT industry watchers. Remember Y2K? People were calling it the COBOL Programmers' Re-employment Act, as companies worldwide begged and bribed a virtually retired community to help them make changes to this language nobody seemed to understand anymore.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 16, 20200 comments