The Insider News

Huffington Post[^]:

Swift is a good move for Apple; it makes developing for iOS more attractive. And because Swift, like Objective-C, is only relevant within the Apple ecosystem it encourages developers to commit exclusively to Apple and neglect other platforms. This is clearly a good outcome for Apple, but it's a bad outcome for developers wanting to engage as many people as possible.

Computerworld[^]:

Next week's seven-bulletin slate, including critical fixes for IE and Windows, won't reach 8.1 unless April's Update has been applied.

SD Times[^]:

Google’s (self-driving) car comes without a steering wheel, brake pedal or accelerator pedal, and although the company says the car can detect objects out to a distance of more than two football fields in all directions, that doesn’t answer the question on how will these cars react to dangerous traffic or road conditions.

The University of Michigan’s Engineering College wants to answer those questions. The university plans to open an automated vehicle test facility this fall.

Brian Harry[^]:

In the time that it took me to drink my morning cup of hot chocolate (I don’t drink coffee), I was able to spin up the VM, start up VS, connect to my VSO account (roaming settings made that even easier), sync my project locally and build my app.

Ars Technica[^]:

Privacy threat that allows websites to know what sites you've viewed is revived.

TechCrunch[^]:

These bots are able to learn and express emotions, and will sell for just under $2,000, with the company believing they’ll be able to serve as babysitters, medical workers or just general companions, all key roles in a market (Japan) where there’s an aging population.

Ars Technica[^]:

A researcher has uncovered another severe vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. It allows attackers to decrypt and modify Web, e-mail, and virtual private network traffic protected by the transport layer security (TLS) protocol, the Internet's most widely used method for encrypting traffic traveling between end users and servers.

re/code[^]:

Google said Thursday that it will start selling a 7-inch tablet to developers interested in the company’s Project Tango 3-D motion-capture effort.

The Verge[^]:

GitHub is an important place, where open source software code is submitted, branched, tweaked, and shared. It is also a playground, where software developer Steve De Jonghe has created a project simply called "Banner."

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I saw a URL today on Twitter to an article on Slate.com. It was a custom short URL - http://slate.me/1h0svt8 but since I was visiting it via Twitter, it was wrapped with Twitter's t.co URL, so I really started at http://t.co/sxSvcJnT2L.

When I visited it for the FIRST time, I got this lovely HTTP interaction. That's SEVEN HTTP 301s, count them, 7, before I get to the destination page.