Mozilla is matching all donations to the Tor Project

Firefox parent Mozilla is returning to back the Tor Project, its long-time ally after it committed to matching all donations made to fund Tor, the open source initiative to improve online privacy which has just started its annual end of year funding drive. Tor announced Mozilla’s support today, extending the pair’s partnership which last year helped Tor raise over $400,000 from a similar campaign last year. That is a small seed round for a tech startup, but it represents an important source of income for Tor, which began soliciting ‘crowdfunded’ donations in 2015 in a bid to offset its reliance on government grants.

Hackers breach Healthcare.gov system, taking files on 75,000 people

A government system used by insurance agents and brokers to help customers sign up for healthcare plans was breached, allowing hackers to siphon off sensitive and personal data on 75,000 people. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services confirmed the breachin a late Friday announcement but revealed few details about the contents of the files stolen.

Encrypted SNI Comes to Firefox Nightly

Firefox Nightly now supports encrypting the TLS Server Name Indication (SNI) extension, which helps prevent attackers on your network from learning your browsing history. You can enable encrypted SNI today and it will automatically work with any site that supports it. Currently, that means any site hosted by Cloudflare, but we’re hoping other providers will add ESNI support soon.

GitHub Actions: built by you, run by us

Yesterday at GitHub Universe, they announced GitHub Actions, a new way to automate and customize user's workflows. Configuring the apps and services that make up user development cycle takes significant time and effort. GitHub Actions applies open source principles to workflow automation, weaving together the tools user use from idea to production into one complete workflow. Users can also create, share, and discover any actions your projects require, just as they would create, share, and discover code on GitHub.

Twilio to Acquire SendGrid, the Leading Email API Platform

Twilio (NYSE:TWLO) and SendGrid today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for Twilio to acquire SendGrid in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $2 billion. At the exchange ratio of 0.485 shares of Twilio Class A common stock per share of SendGrid common stock, this price equates to approximately $36.92 per share based on today’s closing prices. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2019.

Around 62 percent of all Internet sites will run an unsupported PHP version in 10 weeks

The highly popular PHP 5.x branch will stop receiving security updates at the end of the year. According to statistics from W3Techs, roughly 78.9 percent of all Internet sites today run on PHP. But on December 31, 2018, security support for PHP 5.6.x will officially cease, marking the end of all support for any version of the ancient PHP 5.x branch. This means that starting with next year, around 62 percent of all Internet sites still running a PHP 5.x version will stop receiving security updates for their server and website's underlying technology, exposing hundreds of millions of websites, if not more, to serious security risks.

EU approves controversial Copyright Directive, including internet ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

The European Parliament has voted in favor of the Copyright Directive, a controversial piece of legislation intended to update online copyright laws for the internet age. The directive was originally rejected by MEPs in July following criticism of two key provisions: Articles 11 and 13, dubbed the “link tax” and “upload filter” by critics.

GitHub Pull Requests in Visual Studio Code

Like many other open source projects, the Visual Studio Code community collaborates through pull requests to land fixes and new features. Starting this past spring, our team has been working to bring you a new integrated pull request experience so that you can collaborate, comment, review, and validate GitHub pull requests directly from within Visual Studio Code.

AI software market to hit $78B by 2025, here are the top applications for the technology

In 2017, the global software system market size for artificial intelligence (AI) was $2.65 billion. By the end of 2025, however, a new report from QY Research found that it is expected to skyrocket to $78 billion.

React Native, 2 years later

@alloy first mentioned React Native as an option for Artsy back in March 2015, and in February 2016 he made our first commit to get the ball rolling. Since then, we've grown a new codebase, Emission, which has slowly taken over the responsibility for creating the UIViewControllers presented inside our iOS app.