Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Ruby is the only server-side web language which experienced much growth over the last decade—and the closest remaining "threat" to PHP, despite having only 6.5% the presence. (credit: w3techs)

The venerable web programming language PHP is a source of frequent complaints and frustration, but according to a report W3Techs released today, it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.

W3Techs' web server survey looks for technologies in use by sites in Alexa's top 10 million list; today's report includes a year-on-year chart beginning with January 2010, running all the way through 2021. The survey only includes top sites not out of elitism, but as one part of its effort to avoid data-skewing returns from domain-parking services and spammers, which would otherwise dominate legitimate websites through sheer volume.

Within that dataset, the story told is clear. Apart from PHP—which held a 72.5 percent share in 2010 and holds a 78.9 percent share as of today—only one other server-side language ever broke a 10 percent share. That one competitor is ASP.NET, which held an impressive 24.4 percent share in 2010 but was down to 9.3 percent in January and 8.3 percent this month.

Enlarge / A small cnidarian called a hydra (green) has attached itself to the cocoon of a caddisfly. (credit: Yen Fook Chew)

Microscopy is essential to many areas of science. We use it to look at everything from the small devices we fabricate to the tiny structures inside cells. And microscopy wouldn't function without input from many areas of science. Chemistry helps with stains, dyes, and sample preparation. Physics determines what's possible with different forms of optics. And fields like biology and geology tell us which samples can give us valuable information. Combined, these tools give us a nearly infinite suite of options for looking at the world of the small.

With the right choices among those options, a microscope can do far more than just advance science; it can create objects of art. Each year, when Nikon releases the results of its annual microscopy competition, we struggle for new superlatives to describe the images. This year is no exception. So rather than struggling with words, we'll get straight to the images.

The rock. We tend to think of microscopes as examining living matter, revealing details that are critical to understanding cells and the organisms built from them. But chemicals and minerals also have details that aren't always visible to the naked eye and can be critical to their behavior as well. We've always loved close-ups of crystals and rocks, and this year's collection of images contains a surfeit of them.

Enlarge / The Radeon RX 5700 XT. (credit: AMD)

GPU driver releases normally aren't very newsworthy; they usually fix bugs, boost performance in some games, and add support for new GPUs. But owners of last-generation AMD Radeon RX 5000-series graphics cards should take note of today's Adrenalin 21.9.1 release. This update adds support for AMD's "Smart Access Memory" (SAM) feature for older GPUs. AMD says the feature can improve game performance by up to 15 percent in some games.

SAM support was previously restricted to the Radeon RX 6800 series (and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3000 series, which support a mostly identical feature that Nvidia calls Resizable BAR). In addition to the right GPU and the right drivers, you'll also need to be running a supported processor on a supported chipset: either a 10th- or 11th-generation Intel Core CPU in a 400- or 500-series motherboard or a Ryzen 3000 or 5000-series CPU in a 400- or 500-series motherboard.

Whether you're talking about SAM or Resizable BAR, the different names all refer to the same PCI Express functionality. Normally, your computer's processor can only directly access 256MB of your GPU's video memory at a time, and the memory requires larger assets to be broken up into smaller chunks for transfer. Resizable BAR removes that limit and noticeably improves performance in some games. A TechSpot test of 36 games using an RX 6800 GPU and Ryzen 5950X processor observed an improvement of up to 20 percent depending on the game and the settings. For most games, though, performance improved by a much smaller amount or didn't improve at all. A few games even showed performance decreases with SAM enabled, though never by enough to make any games unplayable.

Enlarge / The iPhone 12 mini. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Apple released new versions of its iOS and iPadOS 14, macOS Big Sur, and watchOS 7 operating systems. The updates hit just one day before Apple is expected to reveal its new iPhone and Apple Watch models and the release dates for iOS 15 and watchOS 8.

These updates are security-related across the board, and they add no new features or functionality at all.

Specifically, two main issues have been addressed across Apple's platforms, one with Core Graphics and the other with WebKit. In both cases, maliciously crafted content (PDFs or web content) could be used for arbitrary code execution. Apple also says these updates fix an issue that allowed attackers to bypass Apple protections intended to stop code execution via Messages.

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Facebook had a problem on its hands. People were making posts that got caught in the company’s automated moderation system or were taken down by its human moderators. The problem wasn’t that the moderators, human or otherwise, were wrong to take down the posts. No, the problem was that the people behind the posts were famous or noteworthy, and the company didn’t want a PR mess on its hands.

So Facebook came up with a program called XCheck, or cross check, which in many instances became a de facto whitelist. Over the years, XCheck has allowed celebrities, politicians, athletes, activists, journalists, and even the owners of "animal influencers" like “Doug the Pug” to post whatever they want, with few to no consequences for violating the company’s rules.

“For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards,” reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation. “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

President Joe Biden will reportedly nominate Georgetown law professor and privacy researcher Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission. Bedoya is the founding director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology, where he has focused heavily on facial recognition and other forms of surveillance.

Bedoya co-authored a 2016 report about "unregulated police face recognition in America" after a "year-long investigation that revealed that most American adults are enrolled in a police face recognition network and that vendor companies were doing little to address the race and gender bias endemic to face scanning software," according to Bedoya's bio on the Georgetown Law website. The investigation led to Congressional hearings as well as "a slate of laws reining in the technology across the country, and the first-ever comprehensive bias audit of the technology by the National Institute of Standards & Technology."

Before starting the privacy center at Georgetown, Bedoya was chief counsel for the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. Bedoya's nomination hasn't been officially announced but was reported today by media outlets including Axios and The Washington Post. Biden's announcement is expected to be made today, the Post wrote.