Apple is making Swift open source
This week Apple announced that Swift will soon be open source. In the keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Craig Federighi was met with the applause when he stated that Apple thinks “Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone” and stated “Today we’re announcing that Swift will be open source.” Swift will join the growing array of tech that Apple has decided to make open source as a key part of their software strategy. Federighi outlined the additional new changes we could expect for Swift 2.0, including “all new optimization tech” geared for complex applications. New language features in Swift 2.0 include enhanced error handling, protocol extensions, and interfaces as synthesized headers in Xcode. The compiler and the standard libraries for iOS, OS X, and Linux are said to be released by the end of the year.
France gives Google an ultimatum regarding the Right to be Forgotten
The “Right to be Forgotten” was a ruling of the European Court of Justice a year ago that determined that citizens should be able to request for search engines to remove links to sites from search results if they were considered private. Although major search engines established forms to submit requests in June of last year, Google has only de-indexed content for European domains. Still, Google has removed 41% of all requests submitted over the past year since the ruling. While Google challenges that the Right to be Forgotten was a European law and, therefore, should only apply to European content, the head of France’s regulator CNIL insists that “for delisting to be effective, it must be world-wide.” While the EU does not have legal jurisdiction with regards to Google outside of its domain, the EU is on a quest to protect citizen privacy. Due to the disagreement, this week CNIL mandated that Google to comply with de-indexing demands within 15 days, or face a potential fine just short of $170,000.
Net Neutrality rules go into effect today as scheduled
The FCC’s internet regulations to treat the internet as a public utility go in effect this week, after a three judge panel of the U.S Court of Appeals rejected a petition for a stay on the matter. Several cable companies, including AT&T and Verizon petitioned for a stay of the FCC’s decision, arguing the new rules were unfair and that the FCC did not follow proper procedure when the rules were created. The FCC voted 3-2 in agreement of the new rules last February, ban internet service providers from throttling or blocking connection for specific content, services, or applications. Although the regulations are going into effect today as scheduled, litigation is expected to continue, as 10 separate lawsuits have been filed.
Security fix issued for all versions of IE and Windows
Patch Tuesday released this week by Microsoft addresses 45 unique vulnerabilities, 24 of which are said to be critical Internet Explorer risks. Of those, four expose users to the risk of remote code execution when using IE, which would give attackers the ability to access and alter devices regardless of geographic location. While this may sound dangerous, this month’s Patch Tuesday is uncharacteristically light compared to recent months for Microsoft. The vulnerabilities arise as the browser’s successor begins its debut in the Windows 10 preview.