#software
- GPT-3, One Year On: What Businesses Are Actually Building
A look at the copywriting tools, code assistants, and chatbots built on GPT-3's API a year after wider access opened, plus DALL-E's tantalizing preview.
- One Year of Adaptation: What Software and Science Teams Learned
A year after WHO declared a pandemic, reflecting on which remote-work and rapid-research habits in tech and science are likely to outlast the crisis.
- Old Edge Is Gone, and So Is Flash
Microsoft's March Patch Tuesday quietly retired legacy Edge and expanded the rollout that strips Flash Player out of Windows for good.
- Chrome OS 89 Lands with Phone Hub and Built-In Screen Recording
Chrome OS 89 rolls out with Phone Hub, native screen recording, and a Tote shelf as Chromebook sales keep climbing.
- Epic Games Buys Fall Guys Studio Tonic Games
Epic Games acquired Tonic Games Group, maker of breakout hit Fall Guys, folding four studios into its growing portfolio.
- HAFNIUM Is Tearing Through Exchange Servers, and You Need to Patch Right Now
Microsoft disclosed active exploitation of multiple Exchange Server zero-days by the HAFNIUM group, and admins everywhere are scrambling to patch.
- One Year of Remote-Work Software: How Dev Tools Held Up
A year into the pandemic shift to remote work, looking at how collaboration and dev tooling scaled - and what habits might outlast the office return.
- Facebook Blinks: Australian News Returns After Canberra Deal
Facebook agreed to lift its week-long Australian news ban after the government agreed to amend the News Media Bargaining Code.
- Why 'Zero Trust' Became Security's Favorite Buzzword
Remote work is permanent and the perimeter is gone, so security teams are pitching zero trust architectures instead of trusting the corporate network.
- TypeScript Is Eating JavaScript, One Codebase at a Time
Static typing is winning over plain JS as remote teams lean on TypeScript to catch bugs the code review chat can no longer catch.
- Facebook Just Turned Off News in an Entire Country
Facebook blocked all news links in Australia overnight, and the collateral damage hit health and emergency services pages too.
- Can an AI Chatbot Actually Be Your Valentine?
A Valentine's Day look at Replika and the growing world of AI companion apps built on large language models.
- Git-First and Loving It: What a Year of Remote Work Taught Us About Dev Tooling
A year into distributed work, pull-request-centric, async-friendly workflows are quietly replacing centralized dev processes.
- A Year Into Remote Work, Developer Tools Are Having a Moment
GitHub's 2020 Octoverse data shows Git-centric tools climbing the ranks as distributed teams lean on async collaboration.
- Bezos Hands Amazon's Keys to Jassy
Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO in 2021, moving to Executive Chairman as AWS chief Andy Jassy takes over.
- Clubhouse Goes Mainstream After Elon Musk's Surprise Appearance
Elon Musk's Clubhouse cameo pushed the invite-only audio app's user base from 3.5M to 8.1M in two weeks, crashing servers along the way.
- GitHub's Release Radar Wraps a Big Month for Dev Tools
GitHub's January 2021 Release Radar rounds up Fastify, ECharts-GL 2.0, and VS Code 1.53 in a month packed with open-source shipping.
- Robinhood Freezes GameStop Buying, and the Internet Loses It
Robinhood halted buy orders for GameStop, AMC, and other volatile stocks today, and a $700 million clearinghouse demand is at the center of the backlash.
- SolarWinds Finally Patches Sunburst and Supernova
SolarWinds shipped fresh patches on January 25 addressing both the Sunburst backdoor and the separate Supernova malware found in its Orion platform.
- SolarWinds and the Uncomfortable Truth About Trusting Your Vendors
A joint FBI/CISA/NSA statement pins the SolarWinds breach on a likely Russian actor, and the technical details show just how deeply attackers can hide inside a trusted build pipeline.
- Microsoft Says the Pandemic Just Created 150 Million Future Tech Jobs
Microsoft's new report ties 2020's remote-work shift to a projected 150 million tech and tech-adjacent jobs over the next five years.
- Google Puts $350K Behind the Python Software Foundation
Google is funding malware detection on PyPI and a full-time CPython developer role, a small but telling move toward securing open-source supply chains.
- Software and AI Trends Worth Watching in 2021
Remote-first dev culture, early GPT-3 experimentation, and a brewing chip shortage set the stage for software in 2021.
- New Year's Eve, and Flash Finally Flatlines
Adobe officially ends support for Flash Player today, closing out decades as the web's default plugin for video, games, and animation.
- Kubernetes Won. Now the Fight Moves Up a Layer
With Kubernetes now the default for container orchestration, 2020's cloud-native attention is shifting to service meshes and developer-experience tooling.
- iOS 14.3 Quietly Turns the iPhone 12 Pro Into a RAW Camera
Apple's iOS 14.3 update adds ProRAW support for the iPhone 12 Pro line, plus AirPods Max pairing, Fitness+, and new App Store privacy labels.
- The Day Your Google Login Just... Stopped Working
A 45-minute Google Cloud authentication failure on December 14 knocked out YouTube, Gmail, and sign-ins for third-party apps like Discord.
- SolarWinds: How a Trusted Software Update Became a Backdoor Into the US Government
FireEye's disclosure of a compromised SolarWinds Orion update exposes one of the most consequential software supply-chain breaches yet.
- Money Is Pouring Into No-Code, and It's Not Slowing Down
Unqork, Starburst, and OneTrust all landed huge rounds this month as VCs bet big on tools that let non-engineers build software.
- Salesforce Buys Slack for $27.7 Billion — And the Cloud Wars Get Real
Salesforce announced a $27.7 billion deal to acquire Slack, one of the biggest software acquisitions ever, right as AWS wrapped re:Invent.