In an open letter, Rollout.io is proposing a secure JavaScript Injection approval process to Apple in order to address App Store concerns. Rollout.io recently came under fire for its framework that allows developers to deploy updates directly to their live iOS apps. According to Apple, developers should not be able to change their applications after they have gone through the App Store’s review process.
“Call it what you want – code pushing, hot patching – but the concept is the same: a framework that allows apps to be updated by developers AFTER download,” Eyal Keren, co-founder and CTO for Rollout.io, wrote in the letter. “I think we can agree the goal is sound – reduce bugs and crashes. But is this concept – let’s call it a “Live Update Service” safe? If not, can it be made safe? We have a proposal for you.”
The new solution would allow developers to fix issues instantly while also providing Apple security.
DeepMind focuses on AI continual learning
Google’s DeepMind wants to advance artificial intelligence to be able to continuously learn and retain tasks. According to the team, computer programs typically forget tasks they have already learned as they learn new ones, which is known as catastrophic forgetting. DeepMind believes they can modify the learning rule in order for programs to retain the old tasks and learn new ones.
“Today, computer programs cannot learn from data adaptively and in real time. However, we have shown that catastrophic forgetting is not an insurmountable challenge for neural networks. We hope that this research represents a step towards programs that can learn in a more flexible and efficient way,” the team wrote in a post.
Google announces plans to change Java 8 support in Android
Google is changing the way its Android operating system supports Java 8 language features. The company will add support directly into the current javac and dx set of tools, removing the Jack toolchain. Existing tools and plugins dependent on the Java class format should continue to work during the transition, according to James Lau, project manager at Android.
“We initially tested adding Java 8 support via the Jack toolchain. Over time, we realized the cost of switching to Jack was too high for our community when we considered the annotation processors, bytecode analyzers and rewriters impacted. Thank you for trying the Jack toolchain and giving us great feedback. You can continue using Jack to build your Java 8 code until we release the new support. Migrating from Jack should require little or no work,” Lau wrote in a post.
GitHub’s bug bounty program
GitHub is celebrating its third year of its bug bounty program with winning prizes for security researchers.
The first prize of US$12,000 goes to the research who reported the GitHub Enterprise SAML authentication bypass. Second prize of $8,000 was awarded to the researcher who found a remote code execution bug in the GitHub Enterprise management console, and third prize of $5,000 went to another GitHub Enterprise SAML authentication bypass. In addition, best report bonus of 5,000 went for a report on Server-Side Request Forgery.
According to GitHub, in the program’s third year it paid out a total of $81,700 for 73 submissions, and saw a slight decrease in the number of reports compared to its other years.
The full report is available here.
Mobile Labs releases deviceConnect
Mobile Labs is giving developers and QA teams a new way to manage their mobile testing labs. The company announced deviceConnect, a new mobile testing hosted and on-premises cloud solution designed to make it easier to manage multiple mobile devices for enterprise app testing.
The on-premises implementation provides a central portal to manage devices. The hosted solution features the same software as well as 24/7 access to mobile devices. With the hosted cloud solution, Mobile Labs experts are also responsible for obtaining, installing and maintaining the devices.
Scala Native v0.1 released
The ahead-of-time compiler for Scala is one step closer to version 1.0 with the release of Scala Native v0.1. Scala Native is built on top of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, and is designed to produce native executables.
The latest release features support for the Scala language, interoperability with native code, support for existing Scala IDEs, integration with sbt build tool, cross-publishing infrastructure, and support for the core subset of JDK base libraries.
