"Need a vacation from 2020? Why not go on an adventure and learn programming at the same time?" asks developer Eric Wastl on Twitter, announcing this year's edition of the Advent of Code.

From the site: Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other.

You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Nor do you need a fancy computer; every problem has a solution that completes in at most 15 seconds on ten-year-old hardware.

"PHP version 8.0 has arrived, bringing with it a major update to the 25-year-old programming language..." writes Tech Republic.

New language features include the nullsafe operator and attributes (commonly known as annotations in other languages) to add metadata to classes — and more: The JIT compiler is designed to bring performance improvements to web applications by turning code into instructions for the CPU at runtime. Meanwhile, union types is a feature that allows data of more than one type to be held by a variable. Named arguments allow developers to assign values to a function by specifying the value name, allowing optional parameters to be ignored. Alongside these, version 8.0 of PHP brings optimizations and enhancements to the language's type system, syntax, error handling and consistency....

Commenting on PHP 8.0, PHP programmer and stitcher.io developer, Brent Roose, noted that the latest version of the language may require developers to review code for any breaking changes.

Karan Bajaj, an Indian entrepreneur who teaches meditation and in his recent book invites others to live a life away from the noise, is going after the most vocal critics of his startup. From a report: Bajaj, founder of coding platform WhiteHat Jr, has filed a defamation case against Pradeep Poonia, an engineer who has publicly criticized the firm for its marketing tactics, the quality of the courses on the platform, and aggressive takedowns of such feedback. On Monday, WhiteHat Jr, filed a similar case against Aniruddha Malpani, an investor who has shared unflattering feedback about the startup. Most of the customers of WhiteHat Jr, which is aimed at kids, live in America, and demand for its one-to-one classes has surged nearly 90% this year, according to the startup. In the lawsuit against Poonia -- in which Bajaj is seeking $2.7 million in damages -- Poonia has been accused of infringing trademarks and copyright of properties owned by WhiteHat Jr, defaming and spreading misleading information about the startup and its founder, and accessing the company's private communications app.

[...] The lawsuit, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, appears to be also indicative of just how little criticism WhiteHat Jr, owned by India's second most valuable startup Byju's, is willing to accept. According to internal posts of a Slack channel of WhiteHat Jr shared by Poonia, the startup has aggressively used copyright protection to take down numerous unflattering feedback about the startup in recent months. The suit also raises concern with Poonia accusing WhiteHat Jr of "murdering" an imaginary kid that featured in one of its earlier ads. A 12-year-old child named "Wolf Gupta" appeared in earlier ads of WhiteHat Jr, which claimed that the kid had landed a lucrative job at Google. The kid does not exist, the lawyers of Bajaj say in the suit. Ironically that was also the argument Poonia, who spent a long time trying to unearth more information about this supposed poster child of WhiteHat Jr, was making in his tweets.

Romello Goodman, a software engineer at The New York Times, writing at Increment: Like a sourdough starter passed through the hands of many bakers -- some novices, some experienced -- a codebase reflects how teammates communicate with one another. It's a snapshot of our thinking and our best attempts at codifying norms and assumptions. It's a conversation in which each person contributes and is in conversation with those who came before them. With each new feature or bug report, we understand our code better. We identify areas where new logic doesn't quite fit with existing logic. We're constantly in touch with our own past decisions and those of our coworkers. We're working together, trying to harmonize and match one another's thinking patterns and assumptions. We trust one another to make decisions for the good of the team and the organization. Every piece of new code adds to the culture and cultivates our shared understanding.

If code is sourdough, we have an opportunity to better appreciate the histories and context that have gone into it. In software, we tend to think of legacy code as something that should be thrown away or rewritten, often conflating a codebase's age with its health and viability. But code doesn't age in a vacuum. If sourdough can be passed down from person to person over decades, then so can code. The preservation of decisions and experience is tied to the preservation of our codebase. Even when the code itself is no longer being updated, documentation around the logic or the underlying platform and adjacent technologies can keep a codebase and its culture vibrant. You can then pass that culture on for another team to bake with. It might just taste better than you'd expect.

Reader shanen shares a report (and offers this commentary): When the open source concept emerged in the '90s, it was conceived as a bold new form of communal labor: digital barn raisings. If you made your code open source, dozens or even hundreds of programmers would chip in to improve it. Many hands would make light work. Everyone would feel ownership. Now, it's true that open source has, overall, been a wild success. Every startup, when creating its own software services or products, relies on open source software from folks like Jacob Thornton: open source web-server code, open source neural-net code. But, with the exception of some big projects -- like Linux -- the labor involved isn't particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people. Recently, Nadia Eghbal -- the head of writer experience at the email newsletter platform Substack -- published Working in Public, a fascinating book for which she spoke to hundreds of open source coders. She pinpointed the change I'm describing here. No matter how hard the programmers worked, most "still felt underwater in some shape or form," Eghbal told me.

Why didn't the barn-raising model pan out? As Eghbal notes, it's partly that the random folks who pitch in make only very small contributions, like fixing a bug. Making and remaking code requires a lot of high-level synthesis -- which, as it turns out, is hard to break into little pieces. It lives best in the heads of a small number of people. Yet those poor top-level coders still need to respond to the smaller contributions (to say nothing of requests for help or reams of abuse). Their burdens, Eghbal realized, felt like those of YouTubers or Instagram influencers who feel overwhelmed by their ardent fan bases -- but without the huge, ad-based remuneration. Sometimes open source coders simply walk away: Let someone else deal with this crap. Studies suggest that about 9.5 percent of all open source code is abandoned, and a quarter is probably close to being so. This can be dangerous: If code isn't regularly updated, it risks causing havoc if someone later relies on it. Worse, abandoned code can be hijacked for ill use. Two years ago, the pseudonymous coder right9ctrl took over a piece of open source code that was used by bitcoin firms -- and then rewrote it to try to steal cryptocurrency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T has announced another round of price hikes for DirecTV satellite and U-verse TV services, with monthly prices set to rise up to $9 starting January 17, 2021. "Due to increased programming costs, we're adjusting the price of our video packages," AT&T said in a notice on its website. "Periodically, TV network owners increase the fees they charge DirecTV for the right to broadcast their movies, shows, and sporting events." Of course, AT&T itself determines some of these programming prices because it owns Time Warner.

A $5 monthly increase is coming to DirecTV's 160-channel "Entertainment" package, which currently has a standard rate of $97 a month. A $7 monthly increase is coming to the 185-channel Choice package, currently at $115 a month. A $9 increase is coming to both the 250-channel Ultimate package (currently $142) and the 330-channel Premier package (currently $197). New customers can get those packages for $64.99 to $134.99 under promotional pricing that expires after 12 months. "If you currently have a DirecTV TV promotion, you'll keep that discount until it expires," AT&T said. "Once your promo period ends, you'll pay the new price for your package."

There are also $1 and $3 increases for DirecTV's Basic and Preferred Choice packages for international customers, $6 increases for certain Spanish-language packages, and $8 increases for "Xtra" packages. Only the Minimum service, Family, and ChineseDirect Plus plans are not getting increases. AT&T is raising U-verse TV prices by $5 to $9 a month depending on the package, while keeping the price of the most basic U-verse package the same. U-verse provides TV over AT&T's wired network. As with DirecTV, customers on U-verse promotional pricing won't see the increase until the promotional period ends. DirecTV is also adding a "Federal Cost Recovery Fee of $0.19 per month," similar to a fee that used to be charged once per year. Despite the name, the fee is not mandated by the government. AT&T said the fee covers "expenses that DirecTV pays to the Federal Communications Commission." Ars Technica notes that AT&T did not include any increases for the Regional Sports Network and Broadcast TV fees. It's also decreasing the price of some premium channels. "That includes $3 decreases for Starz, Cinemax, and Showtime," the report says. "There are also decreases of up to $3 for certain add-on bundles that include sports channels. But even with premium channels, there are some price increases, including a $2.96 boost to an add-on bundle that includes HBO Max, Starz, Showtime, Cinemax, and a sports-channel pack."

The full list of price changes can be found here.

Programming columnist Mike Melanson assesses the news that Guido Van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, has come out of retirement to join Microsoft's developer division: The news brought a flurry of congratulations and feature requests, though a few of the suggested features indeed, already exist. Others still were met with informative responses that make the resulting threads worth a perusal, especially if you're looking for a quick "who's who" on Twitter for the world of programming languages. Microsoft's Miguel de Icaza pointed out that this addition adds to the company's now growing list of language designers and contributors:

"The developer division at Microsoft now employs the language designers and contributors to Python, Java, JavaScript, Typescript, F# C#, C++. We just need some PHP, Rust and Swift magic to complete the picture."

[Microsoft senior software engineer Kat Marchán added "We actually have some early ex-moz Rust people too!"]

So, what can we expect from all of this? Is it a corporate takeover of open source, as some further down in the long list of replies always seem to suggest? Or is Microsoft planning the Frankenstein of all languages, with a little bit of this, a little bit of that? In all likelihood, you Python developers using Microsoft products probably have some good features to look forward to in the near future, and that's that, but there's always lingering fears...especially when it comes to Microsoft. As van Rossum suggests, stay tuned.
After Slashdot's earlier story, long-time reader alexgieg posted his own theory: "Several months ago the Excel folk within Microsoft asked users whether they'd like to have Python as an alternative scripting language in Office. Support for that was overwhelming, but nothing more was said on the matter since then. I guess this is Microsoft's answer."

The origins of C++ date back 40 years, yet it remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. TechRepublic spoke to C++ creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, to find out why. An excerpt from the interview: Today, Stroustrup is a Technical Fellow at Morgan Stanley. His work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the C++ standard and on the C++ Core Guidelines are considered part of his role with the finance giant, and he remains very much involved in the development of C++. Most notably, Stroustrup forms part of the direction group, which presents and discusses recommendation about the future of the programming language. He also follows the evolution group, and takes part in discussions about new language features. When it comes to the day-to-day running of C++, however, Stroustrup is happy to take more of a backseat role. "I follow administrative activities but try to do as little as possible there. I am not a great administrator," he admits. Before the pandemic, Stroustrup would travel a lot to teach, and to explain C++ to the world at large through his books, articles, and interviews -- though much like the rest of the world, 2020 has put a temporary end to this.

"For my work, I depend critically on talking with people to learn about their problems and hear how my ideas might help them," Stroustrup says. "In this time of the pandemic, I am deprived of much-needed feedback. Virtual talks and interviews are not the same, and the dynamic of Zoom meetings are inferior to real face-to-face meetings when it comes to discussing design and ideas." The COVID-19 pandemic has also hindered progress with the next two iterations of the language, C++20 and C++23, though Stroustrup affirms that "almost all" of C++20 will ship in 2020. "Beyond that, there is work on Unicode, numerics, game development and low latency, tooling, AI, and much more," he says. "We ship a feature (language and library) when it is ready, and we issue a revised standard every three years. C++14, C++17, and C++20 shipped on time. It is worth noting that the standards effort and the major implementors are very much in sync. "It is crucial that C++ remains coherent and is a stable platform for development."

Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, today announced that he has unretired and joined Microsoft's Developer Division. From a report: Van Rossum, who was last employed by Dropbox, retired last October after six and a half years at the company. Clearly, that retirement wasn't meant to last. At Microsoft, van Rossum says, he'll work to "make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows)." A Microsoft spokesperson told us that the company also doesn't have any additional details to share but confirmed that van Rossum has indeed joined Microsoft. "We're excited to have him as part of the Developer Division. Microsoft is committed to contributing to and growing with the Python community, and Guido's on-boarding is a reflection of that commitment," the spokesperson said.

Casey Liss: For the last year or two, I've come to realize that the number one thing that makes it harder for me to do my job is documentation. Or, more specifically, the utter dearth of documentation that Apple provides for its platforms. As a developer, Apple provides us a series of tools -- APIs -- that allow us to make apps on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS. In many cases, it's fairly straightforward to figure out how to use these APIs. There's only so many ways you can use a screwdriver, and similarly, in many cases there's only one obvious way to use an API. However, as users rightly demand more complicated and fancy apps, the APIs often need to get more fancy and complicated as well. Suddenly you look up and, instead of only using screwdrivers and hammers, you're using power tools and complicated saws, and everything is much more fiddly than it once was. With real tools, you'd expect to receive an owner's manual, which explains how to use the tool you've just purchased. A rough analogy exists for APIs, insofar as most platform vendors will provide documentation. This is basically the "owner's manual" for that API.

Apple's documentation has, for years, been pretty bad. Over the last couple years, it has gone from bad to awful to despicable to embarrassing. All too often, I go to research how to do something new, and use an API I'm not familiar with, only to be stymied by those three dreaded words:

No overview available.

This is Apple's way of saying "Fuck you, figure it out." No overview available is so bad that a popular Apple resource -- itself something that probably shouldn't have to exist -- used it as its namesake for a single-serving site to highlight how bad Apple's documentation is. The march of progress doesn't help, either. As my friend Adam Swinden pointed out to me on Twitter, as old APIs get deprecated, often times the new ones can't be bothered to include documentation. Check out the difference between this API and the one that replaces it. No overview available. Fuck you, figure it out.

theodp writes: The upcoming "Hack the Classroom: STEM Edition," Microsoft explains, "is a [3-day] free virtual event series designed for K-12 educators, parents, and guardians. The sessions will feature resources and tutorials to help educators support students in learning future-ready skills. These lessons can be easily incorporated into classroom curriculum while preparing for this year's Hour of Code event -- a global effort to teach and demystify coding, during Computer Science Education Week, December 7-13."

Microsoft has boasted that the Hour of Code enabled it to reach tens of millions of schoolchildren each year with its drag-and-drop Minecraft-themed tutorials. New for middle and high schoolers this year is the Minecraft Python Hour of Code, which presumably taps into the just-released Python Content for Minecraft: Education Edition (sample Python 101 Lesson). The Hour of Code is run by Microsoft-funded Code.org, whose Board of Directors include Microsoft President Brad Smith.

Appearing on ABC, former Chicago Mayor and Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on Friday volunteered some suggestions for an economic recovery plan that America's next president could implement. "One of the things we've got to do to rebuild, mainly on infrastructure," he begins, before switching to additional ideas for also offering a more promising future to laid-off retail workers by trying to train them for better jobs. "There's going to be people like at JCPenney and other retail — those jobs aren't coming back. Give them the tools..."

One such possible job he offered as an example? Computer programming. "Six months, you're going to become a computer coder. We'll pay for it.... we need to give them a lifeline to what's the next chapter." He believes lots of people would be interested. Although before any of that, Rahm stressed, "The first part of the stimulus is creating a floor so the economy doesn't sink any more. You can't get an economy growing if states and companies are laying people off."

While computer programming was apparently meant as just one example of possible jobs training programs, this appears to have been twisted into claims that Rahm Emanuel believes millions of laid off retail workers should become computer programmers.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp does point out that Emanuel has held a long-standing faith in the potential of computer science education. ("Before leaving office, Emanuel worked to make Computer Science a high school graduation requirement beginning with the Class of 2020, although the Chicago Public Schools waived the requirement this year, citing the pandemic.") But is that also one possible solution for older generations who didn't receive computer science training in high school?

What do Slashdot's readers think? Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Should the retraining programs offered to laid-off retail workers include computer programming?

Netflix has chosen France to test its first channel offering. From a report: Named Direct, the linear channel -- which is only available to subscribers -- will air French, international and U.S. feature films and TV series that are available on the streaming service. However, the channel will only be accessible via the service's web browser, unlike its streaming service, which is found on set-top boxes thanks to distribution deals with French telco groups such as Orange, Canal Plus and SFR. The initiative marks Netflix's first foray into real-time, scheduled programming. The service previously tested the option Shuffle Play, which wasn't in real time but featured recommended programming to a sample of international users, explained a source at Netflix. The difference this time around is that the test is being localized in one country, rather than a sample of users.

For the first time in the history of TIOBE's index, Java has slipped out of the top two, leaving Python to occupy the spot behind reigning champion, C. TechRepublic reports: October's TIOBE index had C at No. 1 and Java at No. 2, and historically those two languages have simply traded spaces while the rest of the competition battled it out for the privilege to fall in behind the two perennial leaders. With Python finally overtaking Java in popularity, the future could be one in which everything comes up Python. "In the past, most programming activities were performed by software engineers. But programming skills are needed everywhere nowadays and there is a lack of good software developers," TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen said. "As a consequence, we need something simple that can be handled by non-software engineers, something easy to learn with fast edit cycles and smooth deployment. Python meets all these needs."

Jansen said that he believes this is the case despite claims from others that Python's popularity is due to booms in data mining, AI, numerical computing, and other initiatives that commonly use Python's extensive data processing capabilities. As TechRepublic's R. Dallon Adams wrote in his piece on the October index, Python has been giving Java a run for its money for some time. October saw Python at No. 3 with the largest year-over-year growth percentage in the top 50 languages. Java, still at second place in October, had the largest negative year-over-year growth rate in the top 50 during the same period. R, Perl, and Go are also all boasting positive growth. "R is in 9th place, the same it occupied last month," reports TechRepublic. "R has experienced explosive growth in 2020, which has led TIOBE to consider it a contender for programming language of the year."

Mint's programmers, led by lead developer, Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, have built their own take on Google's open-source Chromium web browser. ZDNet reports: Some of you may be saying, "Wait, haven't they offered Chromium for years? Well, yes, and no. For years, Mint used Ubuntu's Chromium build. But then Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, moved from releasing Chromium as an APT-compatible DEB package to a Snap. The Ubuntu Snap software packing system, along with its rivals Flatpak and AppImage, is a new, container-oriented way of installing Linux applications. The older way of installing Linux apps, such as DEB and RPM package management systems for the Debian and Red Hat Linux families, incorporate the source code and hard-coded paths for each program.

While tried and true, these traditional packages are troublesome for developers. They require programmers to hand-craft Linux programs to work with each specific distro and its various releases. They must ensure that each program has access to specific libraries' versions. That's a lot of work and painful programming, which led to the process being given the name: Dependency hell. Snap avoids this problem by incorporating the application and its libraries into a single package. It's then installed and mounted on a SquashFS virtual file system. When you run a Snap, you're running it inside a secured container of its own. For Chromium, in particular, Canonical felt using Snaps was the best way to handle this program. [...]

Lefebvre wrote, "The Chromium browser is now available in the official repositories for both Linux Mint and LMDE. If you've been waiting for this I'd like to thank you for your patience." Part of the reason was, well, Canonical was right. Building Chromium from source code is one really slow process. He explained, "To guarantee reactivity and timely updates we had to automate the process of detecting, packaging and compiling new versions of Chromium. This is an application which can require more than 6 hours per build on a fast computer. We allocated a new build server with high specifications (Ryzen 9 3900, 128GB RAM, NMVe) and reduced the time it took to build Chromium to a little more than an hour." That's a lot of power! Still, for those who love it, up-to-date builds of Chromium are now available for Mint users.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Writing in the November Communications of the ACM, MIT's Mitchel Resnick and Natalie Rusk explain that the educational use of coding in schools is at a crossroads. The good news? "School systems and policymakers are embracing the idea that coding can and should be for everyone."

The bad news? "In many places, coding is being introduced in ways that undermine its potential and promise. If we do not think carefully about the educational strategies and pedagogies for introducing coding, there is a major risk of disappointment and backlash." To address this, Resnick and Rusk argue, the design of technologies, activities, curriculum, communities, and spaces to support coding and learning should be guided by the "Four Ps" of Creative Learning: Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play:

"To us, it seems natural to introduce coding to young people in a project-oriented way, so that they learn to express themselves creatively as they learn to code. But many introductions to coding take a very different approach, presenting students with a series of logic puzzles in which they need to program animated characters to move from one location to another. When students successfully solve one puzzle, they can move on to the next. Students undoubtedly learn some useful computational concepts while working on these puzzles. But learning to code by solving logic puzzles is somewhat like learning to write by solving crossword puzzles. That's not the way to become truly fluent. Just as students develop fluency with language by writing their own stories (not just playing word games), students develop fluency with coding by creating projects (not just solving puzzles)."

Putting the Four Ps into practice, the authors concede, is easier said than done. "From our observations of Scratch activities around the world over the past decade, we have seen the value of Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play in supporting the development of computational fluency. But we have also seen that it is not easy to put these four principles into practice within the realities of today's standards-based, assessment-driven classrooms."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The group of Russian hackers accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election earlier this year targeted the email accounts of Democratic state parties in California and Indiana, and influential think tanks in Washington and New York, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The attempted intrusions, many of which were internally flagged by Microsoft Corp over the summer, were carried out by a group often nicknamed "Fancy Bear." The hackers' activity provides insight into how Russian intelligence is targeting the United States in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. The targets identified by Reuters, which include the Center for American Progress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said they had not seen any evidence of successful hacking attempts.

Fancy Bear is controlled by Russia's military intelligence agency and was responsible for hacking the email accounts of Hillary Clinton's staff in the run-up to the 2016 election, according to a Department of Justice indictment filed in 2018. News of the Russian hacking activity follows last month's announcement here by Microsoft that Fancy Bear had attempted to hack more than 200 organizations, many of which the software company said were tied to the 2020 election. Microsoft was able to link this year's cyber espionage campaign to the Russian hackers through an apparent programming error that allowed the company to identify a pattern of attack unique to Fancy Bear, according to a Microsoft assessment reviewed by Reuters. The thrust of espionage operations could not be determined by Reuters. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in August here that Russian operations were attempting to undermine the campaign of presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the American non-profit organization that owns the internet domain names of many movement projects and hosts sites like Wikipedia, has decided to migrate their code repositories from Gerrit to Gitlab. Slashdot reader nfrankel shares the announcement: For the past two years, our developer satisfaction survey has shown that there is some level of dissatisfaction with Gerrit, our code review system. This dissatisfaction is particularly evident for our volunteer communities. The evident dissatisfaction with code review, coupled with an internal review of our CI tooling and practice makes this an opportune moment to revisit our code review choices. While Gerrit's workflow is in many respects best-in-class, its interface suffers from usability deficits, and its workflow differs from mainstream industry practices. This creates barriers to entry for the community and slows onboarding for WMF technical staff. In addition, there are a growing number of individuals and teams (both staff and non-staff) who are opting to forgo the use of Gerrit and instead use a third-party hosted option such as GitHub. Reasons vary for the choice to use third-party hosting but, based on informal communication, there are 3 main groupings: lower friction to create new repositories; easier setup and self-service of Continuous Integration configuration; and more familiarity with pull-request style workflows.

All these explanations point to friction in our existing code-review system slowing development rather than fostering it. The choice to use third-party code-hosting hurts our collaboration (both internal and external), adds to the confusion of onboarding, and makes it more difficult to maintain code standards across repositories. At the same time, there is a requirement that all software which is deployed to Wikimedia production is hosted and deployed from Gerrit. If we fail to address the real usability problems that users have with Gerrit, people will continue to launch and build projects on whatever system it is they prefer -- Wikimedia's GitHub already contains 152 projects, the Research team has 127 projects.

This raises the question: if Gerrit has identifiable problems, why can't we solve those problems in Gerrit? Gerrit is open source (Apache licensed) software; modifications are a simple matter of programming. [...] Upstream has improved the UI in recent releases, and releases have become more frequent; however, upgrade path documentation is often lacking. The migration from Gerrit 2 to Gerrit 3, for example, required several upstream patchsets to avoid the recommended path of several days of downtime. This is the effort required to maintain the status quo. Even small improvements require effort and time as, often, our use-case is very different from the remainder of the Gerrit community.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have extracted the secret key that encrypts updates to an assortment of Intel CPUs, a feat that could have wide-ranging consequences for the way the chips are used and, possibly, the way they're secured. The key makes it possible to decrypt the microcode updates Intel provides to fix security vulnerabilities and other types of bugs. Having a decrypted copy of an update may allow hackers to reverse engineer it and learn precisely how to exploit the hole it's patching. The key may also allow parties other than Intel -- say a malicious hacker or a hobbyist -- to update chips with their own microcode, although that customized version wouldn't survive a reboot.

"At the moment, it is quite difficult to assess the security impact," independent researcher Maxim Goryachy said in a direct message. "But in any case, this is the first time in the history of Intel processors when you can execute your microcode inside and analyze the updates." Goryachy and two other researchers -- Dmitry Sklyarov and Mark Ermolov, both with security firm Positive Technologies -- worked jointly on the project. The key can be extracted for any chip -- be it a Celeron, Pentium, or Atom -- that's based on Intel's Goldmont architecture. In a statement, Intel officials wrote: "The issue described does not represent security exposure to customers, and we do not rely on obfuscation of information behind red unlock as a security measure. In addition to the INTEL-SA-00086 mitigation, OEMs following Intel's manufacturing guidance have mitigated the OEM specific unlock capabilities required for this research. The private key used to authenticate microcode does not reside in the silicon, and an attacker cannot load an unauthenticated patch on a remote system."

An anonymous reader shares a column: In the distant past, there was a proverbial "digital divide" that bifurcated workers into those who knew how to use computers and those who didn't. Young Gen Xers and their later millennial companions grew up with Power Macs and Wintel boxes, and that experience made them native users on how to make these technologies do productive work. Older generations were going to be wiped out by younger workers who were more adaptable to the needs of the modern digital economy, upending our routine notion that professional experience equals value. Of course, that was just a narrative. Facility with using computers was determined by the ability to turn it on and log in, a bar so low that it can be shocking to the modern reader to think that a "divide" existed at all. Software engineering, computer science and statistics remained quite unpopular compared to other academic programs, even in universities, let alone in primary through secondary schools. Most Gen Xers and millennials never learned to code, or frankly, even to make a pivot table or calculate basic statistical averages.

There's a sociological change underway though, and it's going to make the first divide look quaint in hindsight. Over the past two or so years, we have seen the rise of a whole class of software that has been broadly (and quite inaccurately) dubbed "no-code platforms." These tools are designed to make it much easier for users to harness the power of computing in their daily work. That could be everything from calculating the most successful digital ad campaigns given some sort of objective function, or perhaps integrating a computer vision library into a workflow that calculates the number of people entering or exiting a building. The success and notoriety of these tools comes from the feeling that they grant superpowers to their users. Projects that once took a team of engineers some hours to build can now be stitched together in a couple of clicks through a user interface. That's why young startups like Retool can raise at nearly a $1 billion valuation and Airtable at $2.6 billion, while others like Bildr, Shogun, Bubble, Stacker and dozens more are getting traction among users.