News archive (6 / 2021)

GitHub has released an AI-powered coding assistant that can actually write code for you. Dubbed as GitHub Copilot, the new AI tool might transform the way programmers do their work.

Jointly developed by GitHub and OpenAI, the Copilot uses OpenAI Codex AI platform. The AI has been pre-fed with thousands of open source code projects, drawing from vast code repository that GitHub itself is. By using the source material. Copilot has learned how to write code, entire functions and even entire algorithms.

Basically, Copilot can understand even very short hints, like a function call and determine what that function should do - and then write the entire function on its own. So, it is not your dad's old auto-fill service that is available on all code editors, but a really a tool that could take out the most mundane parts of any programming.

Copilot also supports basically all the known programming languages, as programming itself tends ot follow the same rules, regardless of the actual language used. GitHub says that currently it works best for most used languages, such as TypeScript, Ruby, Python, Go and JavaScript. What is even more impressive is the fact that Copilot adapts to each programmer's own programming style and tried to generate code that resembles the programmer's coding style - making the code more readable for its "main pilot".

After the United Kingdom's separation from the Europen Union was finally finalized in January, 2021, the European Union legislations ceased to restrict British corporations. And now, at least one of them, is taking an advantage of the situation.

Back in 2017, European Union introduced a legislation that abolished roaming fees across the Europen Union. Basically this meant that any European citizen could travel to other EU country and use their existing mobile phone contract there, without any extra fees. Calling, texting and data usage cost the same as you'd pay when staying at your own home, even when you're travelling abroad.

Since the Brexit, UK hasn't been part of the European Union and thus, the European legislation doesn't force the hands of its local operators anymore. One of the major operators, British Telecom assured its customers for years that if the brexit would happen, it wouldn't re-introduce roaming fees for British travellers.

Now, company has decided to do exactly that. Starting in 2022, British Telecom's mobile network, EE, customers will have to pay a £2 daily fee in order to use their text, call or data packages when travelling in Europe.

Microsoft finally unveiled its latest operating system, Windows 11, today. The user interface has been completely redesgined, but other major changes occurred, too.

Most visibily, the taskbar of Windows 11 looks totally different from anything we've seen in Windows. It is actually taken mostly from abandoned Windows 10X operating system project that Microsoft had in its plans for light-weight computers. As 10X was eventually scrapped, the UX changes of it made their way to new Windows 11.

One of the most significant changes is the fact that Windows 11 wont support 32-bit CPUs anymore: it is 64-bit only. The entire minimum requirement sheet is:

• 64-bit CPU, with minimum of 1GHz
• at least two CPU cores
• 64GB of storage
• 4GB of RAM
• UEFI-compatible BIOS and motherboard
• at least 9" display, with 1366x768 resolution or better
• DirectX 12 compatible graphics

After Huawei was put on United States' black list back in 2019, the company's phone business has been in rather chaotic state. Finally, in late 2020, Huawei had to sell its sub-brand, Honor, in order to get some much-needed cash and to save at least part of the company's phone business.

Since Honor was spun off, the question about the Honor phones' support has been open: who will provide support for Honor phones sold before the spin-off? Now, there are finally some answers.

According to Finnish mobile news site, SuomiMobiili, older Honor phones will be supported by Huawei, permanently, and only the new Honor phones will be supported by Honor itself. SuomiMobiili approached Honor's Finnish subsdiary directly and got straight answers to its questions about the Honor phone support.

Speicifically, all Honor phones released on or after 1st of April, 2021 will be supported by Honor - everything released before that date, will be supported by Huawei.

Google has once again managed to mess up its flagship product's update on Android phones. Thousands of users across the globe have reported that Google's search app on Android is crashing constantly. So, no, its not you, its the Google.

The problem has been observed with Google's app versions 12.23.16.23.arm64 and 12.22.8.23. Problem seems to be affecting users with various manufacturers, ranging from Samsung, Google's own Pixel phones to Sony phones.

According to Google, the issue should be cleared after phone restart, but according to reports, this hasn't helped everybody.

To fix the problem for now, navigate to your phone's Settings and go to Settings > Apps > Google. There, tap the three dots in the upper corner and choose Remove updates. This should fix the problem until Google releases an official patch to the problem.

Security expert Carl Schou has spotted an interesting bug in Apple's iPhone WiFi connectivity. Joining to a specifically named WiFi network will freeze the phone's entire WiFi connectivity - permanently.

After user joins such network, the WiFi connections freeze completely and not even rebooting the phone will fix the problem. Neither will disabling WiFi and turning it on again. Only solution is to reset all iPhone's network connections completely through iPhone's settings, which will wipe out all the stored WiFi passwords and settings.

After joining my personal WiFi with the SSID "%p%s%s%s%s%n", my iPhone permanently disabled it's WiFi functionality. Neither rebooting nor changing SSID fixes it :~) pic.twitter.com/2eue90JFu3

-- Carl Schou (@vm_call) June 18, 2021

The problem exists also in Apple iPad tablets and behaves similarly. Apple hasn't released a fix to the problem yet.

Rumors surrounding the upcoming Windows event on 24th of June have been pretty wild lately. There has been speculation whether Microsoft will actually roll back on its promise that the Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever. Now, it seems that Windows 10 will, in deed, get a successor.

Microsoft's own Windows product page now lists the end of life date for Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Home editions. Both operating systems are listed to reach their end of support life in 2025. This is pretty solid proof that Microsoft is about to release Windows 11 next week.

When Microsoft released Windows 10 back in July, 2015, the company stated that it would be the "last Windows ever". Since then, company has kept its promise and has simply provided big feature updates to its operating system in form of semi-annual big update packs. But now, it seems that the Redmond giant has something so big in pipeline that it wont be just another update, but an entire new operating system version.

Yes. As unbelievable as it is, its been exactly 22 years since our site was officially launched back in June, 1999.

Back then, majority of the online users connected to the internet using 56k modems and 2G phones were just getting popular. Texting wasn't available in most of the U.S. networks. AltaVista was the biggest search engine...

Yes, technologies have changed over the years. Our site has evolved accordingly. We've seen the good times and bad times - and are unfortunately somewhat experiencing one of those bad times for our dear old site as of now. But as with everything that has happened during the past 22 years, we'll adapt.

I wont go into details of our past further, as I covered our site's history pretty extensively two years ago when our site turned 20. Instead, as always, I'd like to thank all of you. I'd like to thank my coworkers and my co-founders for all these years we've spent together building this site. And obviously, I'd like to thank all of our employees - past and present - for all the hard work they've put into AfterDawn. And last but not least, I'd like to thank all of you: our users, visitors and moderators who have continued to support our site from year after year.

Apparently hackers have managed to breach into gaming giant EA's servers and have stolen 760 gigabytes of data. This stolen data includes the full source code for EA's soccer game FIFA 21 as well as source code for its Frostbite engine.

Frostbite engine is used for games such as Battlefield. According to VICE, EA has confirmed the incident and the data that was stolen from the company.

User data was not stolen, just company's internal development tools, source codes and other development assets. Hackers behind this have tried to sell the material in various net's shady underground forums and commerce sites. Thus, the stolen data hasn't leaked to the wider public - at least, not yet.

About ten minutes ago, some part of the internet's structure crashed. The fingers are pointing to some of the various large CDN and cache providers - guesses at Twitter are that the culprit is Fastly.

Due this, various huge websites, such as Reddit and StackOverflow simply show 503 error for now.

According to DownDetector site, the problems started about 10 minutes ago before we published this story:

The list of affected sites continues to grow: and Twitch are both down. And fingers are pointing at Fastly's server outages.

it looks like Fastly is having a catastrophic outage right now https://t.co/T2ZLzCUVlF

-- Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 8, 2021

Netflix has published a list of its most popular own movies ever.

Topping the chart is the last year's action movie The Extraction with a whopping 99 million views to date. Overall, the list has tons of movies from very recent years, as number of Netflix's subscribers has steadily grown over the years, most notably, globally.

The latest entry to the list is the May 2021 release of Army of the Dead with 72 million views, climbing to the list's tied ninth place, sharing the last spot in the list with last year's George Clooney movie The Midnight Sky.

Here's the full top ten:

1. Extraction (99M)
2. Bird Box (89M)
3. Spenser Confidential (85M)
4. 6 Underground (83M)
5. Murder Mystery (83M)
6. The Old Guard (78M)
7. Enola Holmes (76M)
8. Project Power (75M)
9. The Midnight Sky
   Army of the Dead (tied, both with 72M)

Here' the trailer of the latest entry, the zombie movie Army of the Dead: