Informatics

Kevin Mandia in 2016 (Photo United States Naval Academy)

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Google announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Mandiant Inc., a leader in the field of cybersecurity, paying $23 per share for a total of approximately $5.4 billion. The company will become part of Google Cloud adding Mandiant’s security services to increase customer protection at a time when cyberattacks are more numerous than ever. Recently, there were various acquisition rumors regarding the company founded by Kevin Mandia, also by Microsoft, but it eventually became part of the Google family.

Rene Haas

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The leading graphics processor company NVIDIA and the Japanese telecommunications holding SoftBank Group Corp. have reached an agreement to end the deal to acquire the British microprocessor company Arm Ltd. that was reached in September 2020. Negative or at least concerned opinions expressed repeatedly over time by the USA, UK, and EU antitrust authorities resulted in NVIDIA’s inability to proceed with the acquisition. Arm CEO Simon Segars resigned and was replaced by Rene Haas, who was already the company’s president. The new plan consists of an IPO for Arm, perhaps at the London stock exchange.

Linus Torvalds in 2014

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On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds (photo ©Krd) announced in a message on the comp.os.minix newsgroup the project of a new operating system that actually diverged considerably from Minix. Unhappy with the Minix license, Torvalds adopted a license from the GNU project, the GPL, which seemed to him free enough. After a few weeks, the first Linux kernel was released. The availability of various components released by the GNU project and the contributions of several people who joined the project helped to spread it. Thirty years later, Linux is being used by virtually everyone in one way or another, even if only a small minority realize it.

A schematic of how the system called genomatnn recognizes adaptive introgression

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An article published in the journal “eLife” reports the development of an approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify genes inherited from other species such as Neanderthals that brought positive effects. A team of researchers led by Graham Gower of the Danish University of Copenhagen developed this deep learning technique to examine genomes of modern humans for examples of what is technically called introgression, which means genes that a hybrid between two species brought into one of his parents’ species. Various possible examples have been found, for example, genes inherited from Denisovans have been found in Melanesians that affect various metabolic and disease-related traits.

Fastly network's status after being back to normal

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On Tuesday, a lot of websites worldwide suffered malfunctions that led to some parts missing up to being impossible to connect to them. That was due to a serious problem of Fastly, a CDN (Content Delivery Network o Content Distribution Network) supplier, which means a service that normally allows faster access to a website. The problem started when it was night in the USA with consequences all around the world then it was solved about an hour after being recognized at Fastly. The trouble didn’t last long but show how something going bad in the system of a very important Internet operator can have consequences on a lot of websites. In this case, it was a bug introduced in a recent update that was supposed to be discovered before it caused any damage.