Cardano tops blockchain dev activity for second year, Avalanche witnesses explosive growth

Outlier Ventures has released its blockchain development trends report for Q2 2020/21 and it highlights growing interest around the “Ethereum killers”.

Ethereum is the original smart contract platform and, to this day, hosts the largest number of decentralised applications. With a market cap of $408.3 billion, it’s the second-largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin ($893.5 billion).

However, Ethereum continues to be plagued by slow transaction speeds and high fees....

17 September 2021 | Blockchain

Travis CI flaw exposed thousands of open-source projects’ secrets

A flaw in popular software testing tool Travis CI exposed the secrets of thousands of open-source projects.

Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket.

For at least a week – between 3-10 Sept – open-source repos that used Travis CI had their keys, credentials, and tokens exposed.

Ethereum developer Felix Lange discovered a flaw with how Travis CI handled environmental...

16 September 2021 | Development Tools

Sonatype analysis reveals a 73 percent surge in open-source demand

A report from Sonatype has revealed a 73 percent surge in the demand for open-source despite a year of high profile vulnerabilities.

The growing use of open-source to keep up with the pace of modern development makes it a prime target for cybercriminals. We’ve seen this multiple times in practice over the past year with devastating attacks like that on SolarWinds even making national headlines for its widespread implications.

In fact, Sonatype’s report highlights a...

15 September 2021 | Hacking & Security

Grammarly’s new SDK wants to improve your users’ writing skills

Grammarly has released a new SDK that aims to improve the writing standard of your app’s users.

A good standard of writing can be the difference between getting a job, making a sale, or retaining a customer. The Text Editor SDK released today is the next step in Grammarly’s mission “to improve lives by improving communication”.

The SDK provides everything developers need to deliver easy-to-use, real-time writing assistance across four main categories: correctness...

14 September 2021 | Developer

Epic Games scores for developers in Apple court case

Epic Games has scored for developers in its court battle against Apple over what it considers to be monopolistic App Store policies.

The gaming behemoth took Apple to court following the removal of Fortnite from the App Store. Apple justified its decision as being due to Epic Games breaking App Store policy and using its own billing system.

While smaller developers are now subject to handing a slightly fairer 15 percent cut of sales to Apple, larger developers like Epic...

13 September 2021 | App Stores

GitHub releases analysis of relations between developers and security researchers

Relations between developers and security researchers is critical, but it’s no secret they’re often fraught.

GitHub first announced that it was expanding its research to more fully understand the relationship between developer and security research communities in December 2020. The initial analysis, conducted by GitHub Security Lab, has now been released.

For its debut analysis, Github focused on the vulnerability disclosure process—of which there is currently no...

10 September 2021 | Hacking & Security

Linus Torvalds: GitHub creates ‘absolutely useless garbage’ merges

Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds has criticised GitHub for creating “absolutely useless garbage merges”.

Torvalds’ comment can be viewed in an archive of a Linux development mailing list and was directed at Konstantin Komarov, Founder and CEO of Paragon Software, about the submission of its read-write NTFS driver for the upcoming 5.15 kernel.

“github creates absolutely useless garbage merges, and you should never ever use the github interfaces to merge...

8 September 2021 | Git

Stack Overflow: Cloud migration ‘skyrockets’ following pandemic

Stack Overflow’s second pulse survey focuses on the cloud and highlights a migration acceleration of three to four years following the pandemic.

It’s a well-known fact that some of the biggest technological and societal advancements happened in times of global chaos, often from sheer necessity. While the pandemic brought much tragedy and grief that no-one wants to repeat, there were at least some silver linings in terms of accelerating digital...

3 September 2021 | Cloud

Developers appear to be losing interest in macOS

Analysis conducted by Appfigures suggests that developers are losing interest in macOS.

The number of Mac app releases has been on a steady decline for years, but Appfigures has noted a rapid decrease in recent months that shows no sign of slowing:

In 2020, developers released 392 apps on average per month. In 2021, that’s dropped to 343 per month.

Appfigures isn’t too optimistic about the outlook going forward and forecasts a drop to the low 200s for...

1 September 2021 | App Stores

Google wants to ‘advance cybersecurity’ by fixing open-source and increasing training

Google has committed $10 billion over the next five years to “advance cybersecurity” by fixing some of the key problems with open-source and offering more training.

The announcement follows Google’s participation in President Biden’s White House Cyber Security Meeting this week. Leading tech executives including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai put their heads together following an increasing prevalence and seriousness of cyberattacks.

Open-source is vital and speeds...

26 August 2021 | Hacking & Security