Four short links: 28 September 2016
Offline First, Machine Translation, Kernel Security, and Javascript Maps
- Offline First — as Google designs for the Rest of The World, they’re learning to build entirely different priorities and assumptions into their software. Meet YouTube Go: a new YouTube app built from scratch to bring YouTube to the next generation of viewers. YouTube Go is designed with four concepts in mind. It’s relatable, with video recommendations and a user interface that is made for you. The app is designed to be offline first and work even when there’s low or no connectivity. It’s also cost effective, providing transparency and reducing data usage. And finally, it’s a social experience, connecting you with the people and content you care about.
- Google’s Neural Machine Translation System — On the WMT English-to-French and English-to-German benchmarks, GNMT achieves competitive results to state of the art. Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google’s phrase-based production system.
- Linux Kernel Security Needs Fixing — “Cars were designed to run but not to fail,” Kees Cook, head of the Linux Kernel Self Protection Project, and a Google employee working on the future of IoT security, said at the summit. “Very comfortable while you’re going down the road, but as soon as you crashed, everybody died. That’s not acceptable anymore,” he added, “and in a similar fashion the Linux kernel needs to deal with attacks in a manner where it actually is expecting them and actually handles gracefully in some fashion the fact that it’s being attacked.”
- Leaflet — JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps.
