Day: November 25, 2020

Amazon: We’re hiring software engineers who know programming language Rust

Rust, the programming language hatched at Mozilla, has found a major fan in Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

AWS has announced its intention to hire more Rust developers in coming months as part of its plan to support the open-source community behind the young language, which has become popular for systems programming. 

Open-source Rust only reached version 1.0 five years ago. It was created with a prime goal of eradicating memory-related security bugs in Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine. Many of these security issues were because the engine was written in C++, which Mozilla described as having “an unsafe memory model”. 

Microsoft is also a big fan of Rust has been exploring its use in search of a way of reducing memory-related vulnerabilities in Windows components written in C and C++. But while Rust is well liked, not many developers are familiar with it, Stack Overflow found in its 2020 survey

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Compare: Apple’s M1 MacBook Air kills the iPad Pro for the rest of us

Now that Apple offers Apple Silicon in the MacBook Air, the vast gulf between iPad and Mac performance and battery life has almost disappeared. I’ve been happily using a 12.9-inch iPad Pro for more than a year. I’ve been even happier using the Magic Keyboard, the pricy but excellent add-on keyboard.

But the new MacBook Air has me doubting my life choices. Would I be better served by a MacBook Air? Comparing the two, here’s what I found.

Price

For the same price as a Wi-Fi 1TB iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard – $1,849 – you can get a MacBook Air with a 2TB SSD and 8GB of DRAM. Or save $400 and get the 1TB MacBook Air. That’s a substantial difference.

The difference is more substantial at the entry-level MacBook Air at $999. The equivalent 256GB 12.9-inch iPad Pro costs $1,099 + $349 for the Magic Keyboard. That’s

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UK telecoms industry gives guarded welcome to Telecommunications Bill proposal

Just when anyone would be forgiven for thinking the furore had ended regarding the need for telcos to remove the technology belonging to so called “at-risk” suppliers from their 5G infrastructures, think again, as new UK government legislation to further reinforce this degree opens up new wounds.

The UK government’s Telecommunications (Security) Bill, to be introduced on 24 November, aims to give the government unprecedented new powers to, in its words, boost the security standards of the UK’s telecoms networks and remove the threat of high-risk suppliers, principally Huawei.

It is also said to provide a basis to strengthen the security framework for technology used in 5G and full-fibre networks, including the electronic equipment and software at phone mast sites and in telephone exchanges which handle internet traffic and telephone calls.

The background of the new legislation is the decision in July 2020 by the UK government to commit

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