Wikipedia has a past of being notorious for incorrect information, since it’s a site that anyone can edit. Aaron Halfaker, a senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, has built an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to identify these acts of vandalism, a step toward replacing some of the volunteer editors with AIs. His engine relies … continue reading
Facebook wants to be more than just a social media platform. The company has been dabbling in virtual reality, software development, open-source software, Internet access, and more recently artificial intelligence. “Many people think of Facebook as just the big blue app, or even as the website, but in recent years we’ve been building a family … continue reading
Facebook announced it will be mandating members of its team to switch to Android in an effort to better acquaint them with the world’s largest mobile platform. The company sees this as an essential piece in its efforts to reach new users in markets that are coming online for the first time. Chris Cox, Facebook’s … continue reading
The series of Facebook outages, caused by planned software updates, at the end of last month caused an uproar for millions of its mobile users. The social networking site is trying to prevent the issue in the future by working on two other ways to improve connectivity. There are still users stuck on mobile 2G … continue reading
Facebook is letting Android developers take advantage of its JavaScript framework for native development. The company has announced it is releasing React Native for Android. “React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React,” the company wrote on its GitHub page. “The … continue reading
Facebook is open-sourcing a piece of software that is designed to write software. Hack Codegen is a library that allows users to generate Hack code, the company’s programming language developed for HipHop Virtual Machine. (HHVM is a virtual machine designed to execute programs in Hack and PHP.) “Being able to generate code through automated code … continue reading
IBM is launching new Bluemix services for developers. The new tools are designed to give developers an easy way to integrate data analytics and visualization into their cloud-based applications. IBM Streaming Analytics, now in open beta, provides a way for developers to visualize data. IBM dashDB, now generally available, enables information-management, analytics and business intelligence … continue reading
GitHub is making the jump from Web-based platform to desktop collaboration. This week’s GitHub Project of the Week is not a project at all, but the next natural extension of GitHub’s open-source platform itself. The repository-hosting service has become the social collaboration hub for open-source development, and with the announcement of GitHub Desktop, it looks … continue reading
Researchers from Georgia Tech have discovered an emerging class of C++ bugs, and Facebook has awarded them US$100,000 for their efforts. The bugs are rooted in a new method for identifying “bad casting” vulnerabilities in C++ programs casted dynamically or statically at runtime. The researchers, who presented their findings at the USENIX Security ’15 conference, … continue reading
Devpost, the hackathon platform formerly known as ChallengePost, has released its first Student Hacker Report for the 2014-2015 academic year, ranking the most popular platforms, programming languages, APIs, libraries, frameworks and more at hackathons over the past year. The report shows Android edging out iOS 38.2% to 22.7% for the most popular mobile platform, while … continue reading
More and more tech companies are piling on the “Occupy Flash” movement as Adobe’s Flash Player continues to be beset by publicly known security vulnerabilities. Mark Schmidt, Mozilla’s head of Firefox support, tweeted that the company has officially blocked Flash in all versions of Mozilla Firefox. He clarified that the block will only remain in … continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook, recently held a Q&A session over the social network to find out what is on the community’s mind. Top names such as Stephen Hawking, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arianna Huffington joined in on the conversation, and while questions ranged from salary, working out and happiness, others provided insight into the company’s … continue reading
