Alex Blewitt
InfoQ
United Kingdom
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Past articles by Alex:
Supreme Court rules Google's use of Java API was Fair Use
The Supreme Court in the United States of America has ruled that Google's use of the Java API was fair use, and that the objections raised by Oracle are rejected. InfoQ looks back at the history and what this means for the future of APIs. → Read More
JFrog to shut down JCenter and Bintray
JFrog has announced that it is shutting down the Bintray asset hosting service, which includes the JCenter Java repository, often used by Gradle and Android builds. Uploads to Bintray will be blocked at the end of the month, and assets will be unavailable for download after the end of April, and deleted shortly afterwards. Read on to find out what this means for your Java build pipelines. → Read More
Java turns 25
On January 23rd, 1996, Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Java 1.0, an object oriented, platform neutral programming language. InfoQ looks back at what has happened since. → Read More
Farewell to Flash
Flash reached end of life on 31st December 2020. InfoQ looks back at the contribution that Flash made to the early web, and what will be missed after its demise. → Read More
Five Years of Lets Encrypt
Five years ago, a non-profit organisation set up a public certificate authority, with the intent of enabling websites to become more secure by default through automated provisioning of TLS certificates. Five years later, and Lets Encrypt is putting together its own top-level root CA, which will be served by default next year - but some older Android versions won't be able to use it. → Read More
OSGi Alliance to transition to Eclipse Foundation
The OSGi Alliance announced that after 21 years of being an independent foundation that they would be transferring their assets into the Eclipse Foundation, and continuing work under the OSGi Working Group. InfoQ reached out to Dan Bandera, President of the OSGi Alliance, to find out more about the move. → Read More
Scripting Java with a jBang
JBang provides a way of running Java code as a script, similar to JShell. However, unlike JShell, JBang works great on Java 8 and can be used to automatically download dependent libraries as well. In fact, JBang can even run without Java being installed -- it will simply download an appropriate JVM if needed. → Read More
Hacked Off with Hacktoberfest
Hacktoberfest is a promotion that Digital Ocean runs to encourage developers to contribute patches to open-source repositories hosted on GitHub in exchange for a free T-shirt. This year, however, there have been complaints by many open-source contributions being made that add little or no value to projects on GitHub, which is causing some strain on the community. InfoQ investigates. → Read More
New GitHub Repositories Default to Main Branch
All newly created GitHub repositories will default to 'main' for their main branch from today. In addition, existing repositories can also rename the 'master' branch; read on to find out why you might want to do this, and the support that GitHub is providing to make this transition seamless. → Read More
40th Anniversary of The Ethernet
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the creation of The Ethernet, with a readable specification that is still valid today. InfoQ looks back to where it came from, what it powers, and how it's still relevant today. → Read More
Twitter Hack was Inside Job
Yesterday, a number of tweets were posted from a number of high profile accounts advertising a 2-for-1 scam on Bitcoin. What happened and why? InfoQ investigates. → Read More
Disabling Google 2FA doesn't need 2FA
A developer's machine, compromised by attackers, was able to use Safari auto-fill to log into passwords.google.com, disable 2FA and extract passwords without notification. InfoQ spoke to Amos (@fasterthanlime) on Twitter about his experience and advice for others who might find themselves in the same situation. Read on to find out what happened, and what you should do to protect your assets. → Read More
LinkedIn iOS Clipboard Copying Was Bug
The LinkedIn iOS app has been found to be reading the clipboard repeatedly during use, since iOS 14 (Beta) introduces a new feature indicating when the app interacts with the clipboard. Many other apps have been having similar issues. However, LinkedIn confirmed that the iOS behaviour was a bug, and has been fixed. Read on for what happened. → Read More
Apple's Rosetta Move
Apple has announced that future Macs will be built on an ARM platform, known as Apple Silicon. What does this mean for application developers on the Mac platform, and the wider picture of the development community? Read on to find out what's new and what the future holds. → Read More
AdoptOpenJDK to become Eclipse Adoptium
The AdoptOpenJDK project is to move under the Eclipse umbrella as Eclipse Adoptium as part of a transition to an open-source foundation. Having a a vendor-neutral open-source foundation to steward the AdoptOpenJDK project will give a strong basis for the future. Read on to find out what it means from a practical perspective and how the transition will play out. → Read More
NHSx Covid-19 App on Trial
The NHSx mobile application for tracking Covid-19 has been released for a trial on the Isle of Wight, but problems with the implementation and reliability mean that the app might be outdated before it achieves herd immunity. InfoQ looks at the source code and the results of the trial, and what it might mean for other applications following a similar path. → Read More
DNSSEC Root KSK Ceremony 41 Taking Place on Thursday
The DNSSEC signing ceremony, which takes place as an in-person event every three months, will be a combined physical and virtual event on Thursday at 17:00 UTC. The next few month's signing keys for the DNSSEC root nameservers will take place, but not all of the keyholders will be physically present due to travel restrictions caused by COVID-19. Find out how the ceremony has been adapted. → Read More
Theia Framework 1.0 Enables Web IDEs
Theia is a framework for building multi-language IDEs upon JavaScript, and powers GitPod.io, Arduino's new Pro IDE, and Arm's new mBed Studio. Earlier this week they released 1.0 signifying that they had reached stability and the vendor-neutral open-source framework was ready for use. Read on to find out more about what Eclipse Theia delivers and how it differs from VS Code. → Read More
DNSSEC Signing Potentially Interrupted by Coronoavirus
The DNSSEC signing process, which has happened every three months for the last ten years, is likely to be unable to happen due to travel restrictions caused by Coronavirus. Read on to find out what the problems are, and how they plan on keeping DNSSEC running after summer 2020. → Read More
Understanding CPU Microarchitecture to Increase Performance
Alex Blewitt presents the microarchitecture of modern CPUs, showing how misaligned data can cause cache line false sharing, how branch prediction works and when it fails, how to read CPU specific performance monitoring counters and use that in conjunction with tools like perf and toplev to discover where bottlenecks in CPU heavy code live. → Read More