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Technology in 2018 is increasingly built around data. Companies collect it, applications process it, machine-learning systems learn from it, and users are becoming more aware — sometimes more alarmed — about how it is stored and protected. That makes Computer Engineering a particularly relevant field to study. Read more
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NVIDIA announced the Turing GPU architecture at SIGGRAPH on August 13, 2018, with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ($999/$1,199), RTX 2080 ($699/$799), and RTX 2070 ($499) going on sale September 20, 2018. Turing (TU102 die for RTX 2080 Ti, TU104 for RTX 2080) was manufactured on TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process and contained 18.6 billion transistors in the flagship TU102 — 54% more than Pascal’s GP102 (12 billion). The two defining new hardware blocks were RT Cores (first ever in a consumer GPU, one per SM) and 2nd-generation Tensor Cores (inherited from the Volta data-center GPU, brought to consumer hardware for the first time). RT Cores accelerated the most computationally expensive parts of ray tracing: BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) traversal (the tree search to find which scene geometry might intersect a ray) and ray-primitive intersection testing (the geometric calculation to determine exact intersection point and surface normal). Without RT Cores, ray tracing required thousands of CUDA cores to evaluate these tests in software, consuming the majority of the compute budget for even one bounce of reflected light per pixel at 1080p resolution. With RT Cores offloading these two operations to fixed-function hardware, the CUDA cores could focus on shading and color calculation, allowing real-time ray-traced shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion at playable frame rates for the first time. Read more
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People who are not software developers often have remarkably good questions about how software works. Here are some of the ones I hear most often, along with honest answers. Read more
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Chrome 68 shipped on July 24, 2018 with a single widely noticed change: every HTTP page displayed a “Not secure” label in the address bar’s security chip, to the left of the URL. Previously, Chrome and other browsers had used a positive indicator model — HTTPS pages showed a green padlock icon with or without the domain name, while HTTP pages showed nothing or a neutral icon, creating the impression that HTTP was a safe baseline rather than an actively insecure choice. Google had been phasing in the change across multiple Chrome releases: Chrome 56 (January 2017) first added the “Not secure” label on HTTP pages containing password or credit card input fields; Chrome 62 (October 2017) extended the label to all HTTP pages with any form input and all HTTP pages in Incognito mode; Chrome 68 expanded it to all HTTP pages unconditionally. Chrome 70 (October 2018) made the label red-colored when users began typing into any HTTP page, adding visual urgency at the moment of risk. Google had announced this incremental plan in September 2016 as part of its public commitment to treating HTTPS as the baseline security assumption for the web. Read more
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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2018, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more
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Microsoft announced the acquisition of GitHub on June 4, 2018 for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock — the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history at the time, surpassing the $2.5 billion paid for Minecraft’s developer Mojang in 2014. The deal closed October 26, 2018. GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath, who had co-founded the company with Tom Preston-Werner and P.J. Hyett in 2008, stepped down; Nat Friedman (previously CEO of Xamarin, itself acquired by Microsoft in 2016) was appointed GitHub CEO. Read more
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Computer vision is often associated with faces, autonomous vehicles, or robotics. Food science is a less obvious application, but it is one of the areas where camera-based inspection has been deployed commercially for decades — and where recent advances in deep learning have significantly expanded what is practical. Read more
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For most of JavaScript’s history, the language had no built-in way to split code across files and have those files depend on each other explicitly. This is a basic feature that Python, Java, and Ruby all had from early on. JavaScript’s absence of a module system was a genuine hole, and the ecosystem filled it with workarounds that accumulated into something genuinely complicated. Read more
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The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became enforceable on May 25, 2018, two years after its adoption in April 2016. It applied to any organization processing personal data of EU residents, regardless of where the organization was headquartered — making it effectively a global regulation for any company with EU users. Maximum fines were €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever was higher. The first major fine came in January 2019: France’s CNIL fined Google €50 million for insufficient transparency in its Android onboarding consent flow. British Airways received a £183 million fine (later reduced to £20 million) in 2020 for a 2018 data breach affecting 500,000 customers. Read more
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Cloudflare launched its public DNS resolver at the IP address 1.1.1.1 on April 1, 2018 — deliberately choosing April Fool’s Day for a memorable launch date — in partnership with APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre). APNIC had owned the 1.1.1.1 address for years but had been unable to use it productively because router firmware worldwide had hardcoded it as a test address, flooding it with junk traffic; the partnership gave Cloudflare access to the memorable address while APNIC gained research data on global DNS query patterns. Cloudflare’s anycast network (servers in 150+ cities at that time) delivered median global response times of ~14 ms according to independent tracking by DNSPerf.com, compared to ~20 ms for Google’s 8.8.8.8 (launched December 2009) and ~20 ms for OpenDNS’s 208.67.222.222 (launched 2005) — making Cloudflare’s claim of “the world’s fastest DNS resolver” defensible at launch. The secondary resolver address was 1.0.0.1. Read more
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The timing of this post is not accidental. This month — March 2018 — the Cambridge Analytica story broke in the New York Times and the Observer, describing how the company had harvested data from up to 87 million Facebook users without their explicit consent, using an academic researcher’s app as the collection mechanism. The story arrived two months before the GDPR’s enforcement date of May 25, 2018. If there was ever a moment to think carefully about who owns personal data and what obligations come with collecting it, this is it. Read more
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Kubernetes achieved graduated project status in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on March 6, 2018, becoming the first project to complete the CNCF’s three-level maturity progression (Sandbox → Incubating → Graduated). The CNCF had been founded in July 2015 when Google donated Kubernetes to the foundation at the same event where Kubernetes 1.0 was announced (July 21, 2015, at OSCON in Portland) — a governance move designed to prevent Kubernetes from being perceived as Google’s proprietary project and to enable contributions and adoption across the industry without concerns that Google could change the direction unilaterally. CNCF graduation required a Technical Oversight Committee vote with a two-thirds supermajority; prior to the vote, the project had to demonstrate documented governance processes, committer diversity (no single company dominating more than 50 percent of commits), completion of a third-party security audit, and substantial production adoption by organizations outside the originating company. By March 2018, Kubernetes had over 1,400 contributors from 200+ organizations across its repositories, with Google’s share of commits having fallen well below 50 percent as Red Hat, CoreOS (acquired by Red Hat February 2018), Huawei, Microsoft, and IBM made substantial contributions. Simultaneously with Kubernetes’s graduation, Prometheus (the monitoring system originally developed at SoundCloud) also graduated, making the two foundational pieces of the cloud-native stack — orchestration and observability — both vendor-neutral CNCF graduated projects. Read more
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SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy for the first time on February 6, 2018 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A — the same pad that launched Apollo 11 in 1969. The rocket combined three Falcon 9 first-stage cores (27 Merlin 1D engines total) and could deliver 63,800 kg to low Earth orbit, 26,700 kg to geostationary transfer orbit, and 16,800 kg to Mars — more than any operational rocket since NASA’s Saturn V flew its last mission in 1973. The test payload was Elon Musk’s personal 2010 Tesla Roadster, with a “Starman” mannequin in the driver’s seat and a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the glovebox. The car was placed into a heliocentric solar orbit intended to reach Mars’s orbit; it slightly overshot, entering an orbit with aphelion approximately 257 million kilometers from the Sun. Read more
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On January 3, 2018, Google Project Zero published details of two classes of vulnerabilities affecting almost every modern processor: Meltdown and Spectre. The coordinated disclosure involved Intel, AMD, ARM, the major operating system vendors, and cloud providers — a coordination effort that had been running secretly since June 2017 while patches were developed. Read more
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Meltdown and Spectre became public in January 2018 and changed how many engineers thought about processor performance. The vulnerabilities were disturbing because they did not look like ordinary software bugs. They came from the techniques modern CPUs use to run programs faster, especially speculative execution and caching. Read more
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Apple confirmed on December 20, 2017 that iOS implemented “performance management” — dynamic CPU and GPU frequency limiting — on older iPhones with chemically degraded batteries, following a Reddit post by user “TeckFire” in October 2017 claiming that replacing an iPhone 6S battery had restored its performance, and a detailed benchmark analysis published December 9, 2017 by John Poole of Primate Labs (makers of Geekbench). Poole compared Geekbench 4 single-core scores from thousands of iPhone 6S devices running different iOS versions and found a distinctive bimodal distribution in iOS 10.2.1 and later: devices clustered at either the expected ~2500 score range or a lower ~1400-1600 range, with the lower cluster growing larger in iOS versions released in 2017. When Poole tested the same 6S with a fresh battery versus a degraded one, the degraded battery device scored in the lower cluster. Apple’s statement confirmed that iOS 10.2.1 (released January 23, 2017) had introduced performance management for iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, and 6s Plus, and that iOS 11.2 extended it to iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The feature had not been disclosed in any iOS release notes, developer documentation, or user-facing settings. Read more
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Amazon introduced the Echo in late 2014, and it spent a year available only by invitation before opening broadly. Google Home launched in November 2016. Apple announced HomePod at WWDC in June and it will ship next year. In three years, voice-activated speakers have moved from a product few people had heard of to the fastest-growing consumer electronics category. Read more
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Mozilla released Firefox 57 — branded Firefox Quantum — on November 14, 2017, describing it as the biggest improvement to Firefox in over a decade. The release incorporated Stylo, a parallel CSS engine written in Rust and derived from Mozilla’s experimental Servo browser project. Stylo processed style recalculation across multiple CPU cores simultaneously, taking advantage of modern multi-core CPUs that the original Firefox engine (Gecko) had been written before were common. Mozilla reported Firefox 57 used 30% less memory than Firefox 52 and was twice as fast on the Speedometer browser benchmark, while internal testing showed it catching up to Chrome on most common web page rendering tasks. Read more
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Every November 10, Turkiye remembers Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Read more
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Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL on October 4, 2017. The standard Pixel 2 had a 5-inch 1080p OLED display and sold for $649; the Pixel 2 XL had a 6-inch 2880×1440 pOLED display and sold for $849. Both used the Snapdragon 835, 4GB RAM, and a single 12.2 MP rear camera with an f/1.8 aperture — no telephoto lens, no wide-angle, just one sensor with a dual-pixel autofocus array. The iPhone 8 Plus released the same month had a dual 12MP setup (wide + telephoto), and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 also shipped with two rear cameras. Read more