Rust 1.85 arrives with long-awaited async closures
Rust 1.85, the latest version of the burgeoning language positioned for speed, safety, and ease of use, has arrived, with new capabilities including async closures. The release also constitutes a stabilization of the Rust 2024 edition of the language....
Skype Hangs Up (For Good) on May 5 – Export Data Before Then!
Skype, one of the best-known video chat/calling apps, is shutting down forever on May 5, Microsoft has announced today. Nothing gold can stay, and neither can VoIP services shorn their cultural zeitgeist it seems. Replacing Skype will be a free version...
Google’s AlloyDB is looking more and more like PostgreSQL
Google is adding new features to its fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) AlloyDB in order to provide enterprises with an alternative to PostgreSQL, which has become the most popular choice when transitioning from legacy database management sys...
Linux App Release Roundup (Feb 2025)
February proved a bumper month for Linux software updates, seeing big release of productivity suites LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE and, plus a crop of smaller app updates which didn’t merit a full-length article on this blog. Rather than skip over those...
Mozilla deletes promise not to sell Firefox users’ data
The hits just keep on coming. Mozilla not only changed its Privacy Notice and introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time with some pretty onerous terms, they also removed a rather specific question and answer pair from their page with fre...
How to conduct a vulnerability assessment
The realm of information security is fraught with jargon, as anyone who has come across vulnerability-related terms can tell you. To complicate matters further, some of these terms are used interchangeably or in contexts outside of computing. This can ...
Do more with Python’s new built-in async programming library
There’s lots to do in this edition of the Python Report: Do more than one thing with Python’s async. Do the math faster in Python with NumPy. Do Python in Visual Studio Code, and do it the right way with our get-started guide. And do use Python’...
The rising threat of shadow AI
Employees in a large financial organization began developing AI tools to automate time-consuming tasks such as weekly report generation. They didn’t think about what could go wrong. Within a few months, unauthorized applications skyrocketed from jus...
