‘Pickles & Spores: Improving Support for Distributed Programming in Scala
‘Spores are “small units of possibly mobile functional behavior”. They’re a closure-like abstraction meant for use in distributed or concurrent environments. Spores provide a guarantee that the environment is effectively immutable, and safe to ship over the wire. Spores aim to give library authors some confidence in exposing functions (or, rather, spores) in public APIs for safe consumption in a distributed or concurrent environment. The first part of the talk covers a simpler variant of spores as they are proposed for inclusion in Scala 2.11. The second part of the talk briefly introduces a current research project ongoing at EPFL which leverages Scala’s type system to provide type constraints that give authors finer-grained control over spore capturing semantics. What’s more, these type constraints can be composed during spore composition, so library authors are effectively able to propagate expert knowledge via these composable constraints. The last part of the talk briefly covers Scala/Pickling, a fast new, open serialization framework.’
(tags: pickling scala presentations spores closures fp immutability coding distributed distcomp serialization formats network)
BBC News – Microsoft ‘must release’ data held on Dublin server
Messy. I can’t see this lasting beyond an appeal.
Law enforcement efforts would be seriously impeded and the burden on the government would be substantial if they had to co-ordinate with foreign governments to obtain this sort of information from internet service providers such as Microsoft and Google, Judge Francis said. In a blog post, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, David Howard, said: “A US prosecutor cannot obtain a US warrant to search someone’s home located in another country, just as another country’s prosecutor cannot obtain a court order in her home country to conduct a search in the United States. “We think the same rules should apply in the online world, but the government disagrees.”
(tags: microsoft regions law us-law privacy google cloud international-law surveillance)
Russia passes bill requiring bloggers to register with government
A bill passed by the Russian parliament on Tuesday says that any blogger read by at least 3,000 people a day has to register with the government telecom watchdog and follow the same rules as those imposed by Russian law on mass media. These include privacy safeguards, the obligation to check all facts, silent days before elections and loose but threatening injunctions against “abetting terrorism” and “extremism.”
Russian blogging platforms have responded by changing view-counter tickers to display “2500+” as a max.(tags: russia blogs blogging terrorism extremism internet regulation chilling-effects censorship)