Back from vacation, we’re now trying to finalize 1.13.1 and get it to you as soon as possible. Consider this a pre-pre-release, maybe?

A full changelog for this snapshot can be found on Minecraft.net.

CHANGES IN 18W33A

• Improved performance of liquids in the world
• Added tooltips to bucket of tropical fish
• Bug fixes!

BUGS FIXED IN 18W33A

• MC-135893 – Upgrading from 1.12.2 to a newer version will cause trapped chests placed in 1.12.2 & earlier to stop triggering redstone through the floor
• MC-135857 – Beacon effect icon doesn’t have a blue edge if it overwrites a potion effect
• MC-135816 – Trident does not return uppon reload of world
• MC-134702 – Fish spawned from buckets count towards the aquatic mob cap
• MC-133127 – Drowned from ocean ruins never spawn with a trident/nautilus shell/fishing rod
• MC-133098 – Loading a world with a corrupted stats file crashes the game
• MC-132063 – Stone item appears when resizing window
• MC-131346 – It’s possible to place buckets of water, lava or fish in adventure mode
• MC-118258 – Spelling mistakes in the ‘Commandblock chain tried to execure more than x steps!’ warning message
• MC-108592 – Witches do not despawn correctly if they have a potion effect
• MC-98796 – Armor loses durability when blocking damage with shield
• MC-90842 – Sweep attack knocks back marker armor stands
• MC-86943 – Cooldown overlay is solid white on item stacks > 1
• MC-79697 – Entities don’t render properly when next to invisible spider, charged creeper, or wither boss with armor
• MC-3715 – Beds and the /teleport command

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.13.1 is shaping up in the comments below!

General

• Fixed an issue where players could not upgrade Solstice of Heroes armor
• Note: Players may continue to see the Solstice of Heroes Milestone, even after fully upgrading armor and completing all objectives.

---

Localization

• Fixed German description of Iron Emote bundle.

Disruption/Insults/Disrespect

Disruption/Insults/Disrespect

Harassment/Personal Attacks/Privacy Violation

Gory Violence/Explicit Sexuality

Illegal Activity

Hacking/Cheating

Spoilers/Stolen Content

Soliciting/Phishing/Impersonation

Diversity and inclusion are hot topics as projects compete to attract more talent to power development efforts now as well as build their ranks to carry the projects into the future. The Diversity Empowerment Summit co-located with Open Source Summit coming up in Vancouver August 29-31, will offer key insights to help your project succeed in these endeavors.

Although adoption of diversity and inclusion policies is generally seen as simply the right thing to do, finding good paths to building and implementing such policies within existing community cultures continues to be challenging. The Diversity Empowerment Summit, however, provides hard insights, new ideas, and proven examples to help open source professionals navigate this journey.

Nithya Ruff,  Senior Director, Open Source Practice at Comcast, and member of the Board of Directors for The Linux Foundation, says “the mission of open source communities to attract and retain diverse contributors with unique talent and perspectives has gathered momentum, but we cannot tackle these issues without the support of allies and advocates.” Ruff will be moderating a panel discussion at the conference examining the role of allies in diversity and inclusion and exploring solid strategies for success.

Read more at The Linux Foundation

Inside Xbox kicks off one of the world’s largest video game shows with a live broadcast direct from Cologne, Germany on Tuesday, August 21 at 7:30 a.m. PDT/10:30 a.m. EDT on Mixer, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Our gamescom content will include the latest on Forza Horizon 4, Sea of Thieves, and State of Decay 2, plus breaking news, exclusive interviews and never-before-seen content for many other games.

Stay tuned @Xbox on Twitter and here on Xbox Wire for the latest Inside Xbox: Live @ gamescom news, and mark August 21 on your calendar so you don’t miss out!

This week we released Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8. Our 15.8 update brings the following improvements for web developers:

• Custom docker image tags during Publish
• Zip push deployment for Azure Functions
• Managing user secrets in ASP.NET Framework projects (targeting .NET 4.7.1 or higher)
• Enabling Application Insights as part of publishing to Azure App Service
• Optimizing build performance for solutions containing ASP.NET Framework projects
• Author and source information for ASP.NET Core templates

Custom docker image tags during Publish

You can now customize the “Image tag” for Docker containers when publishing them to a container registry. The value can either be automatically generated by Visual Studio every time you publish (the previous behavior), or it be manually changed if you need a consistent tag (e.g. “latest”):

Zip push deployment & run from zip for Azure Functions

Visual Studio now provides the option to deploy and run Azure Functions projects as zip files:

Run-From-Zip is a runtime feature that allows ‘mounting’ a zip file and running directly from it. Your App runs directly over the ‘mounted’ zip file, which completely takes over your wwwrootfolder (which becomes read-only).  Using run from Zip offers the following benefits:

• Atomicity: when your application is deployed as as single unit, and updated as a single unit meaning publishing an update will never leave your app in a partially updated state
• Faster deployment of large applications
• Improved cold start performance

Managing user secrets in ASP.NET Framework projects (targeting .NET 4.7.1 or higher)

A feature that ASP.NET Framework projects were missing compared to ASP.NET Core was support for storing application secrets (e.g. connection strings, API keys, etc.) in a file outside of source control unique to each user. Now, with .NET Framework 4.7.1 and Visual Studio 15.8 it’s as simple as right clicking on the project in Solution Explorer and selecting “Manage User Secrets”:

Visual Studio will take care of the rest including downloading the necessary NuGet packages, updating the web.config file, creating the secrets file on disk and finally opening it for you to edit:

Note: Only available for projects targeting .NET Framework 4.7.1 or higher, if you can’t see the menu item make sure you have the 4.7.1 targeting pack installed and that the project is actually targeting 4.7.1, you can change it from project properties:

Enabling Application Insights as part of publishing to Azure App Service

When publishing to Azure App Service, Visual Studio asks you to either create a new App Service or re-use an existing one. If you choose to create a new App Service to host your application, Visual Studio now offers you the ability to also provision and configure Application Insights:

All you need to do is pick the region you would like Application Insights to be provisioned in and Visual Studio will make sure it’s configured to pick up telemetry events and metrics from the new App Service. If you wish to add custom events and metrics follow this guide. Of course, you can always set the field to “None” and Visual Studio will not provision nor configure Application Insights on your behalf.

Optimizing build performance for solutions containing ASP.NET Framework projects

We added a new menu item under Build | ASP.NET Compilation | Optimize Build Performance for Solution:

This new menu item is applicable to solutions containing ASP.NET Framework projects only and is not applicable to ASP.NET Core projects. Its purpose is to update specific ASP.NET related NuGet packages referenced by the codebase.

When an ASP.NET Framework codebase is using out-of-date packages, the inner loop performance of Visual Studio is impacted. The motivation behind updating these packages is to restore optimal inner loop performance for a given solution.  You will only have to do this once per solution and you will not have to deal with this problem in the future since the new package is designed in a way that even when it gets out of date it doesn’t affect the inner loop performance in Visual Studio.

Author and source information for ASP.NET Core templates

The dialog for new ASP.NET Core projects now shows you the author and source for the selected template:

• If the template is coming from a .NET Core SDK installed on the machine, the dialog will now display the version of the SDK as the source
• If the template is coming from a VSIX (i.e. Visual Studio extension) installed on the machine, the dialog will now display the name of the VSIX as the source

Conclusion

If you’re interested in the many other great things that Visual Studio 2017 15.8 brings, check out our Visual Studio 15.8 post on the Visual Studio blog.

We hope that you’ll give 15.8 a try and let us know how it works for you. If you run into any issues please report them using Visual Studio, or let us know what you think below, or via Twitter.

On returning from a hunting trip the king finds his people revolting. Revolting in the social unrest sense of the word to the point that they are threatening to riot over tax increases. Although it is probably true to say that they were also revolting in the physical sense since they only bathed once a year and got by on a diet of cabbages and turnips, which play havoc with the digestive system. The king, refusing to heed the warnings of his advisers, decides to put on a show of strength by gathering his most trusted knights and marching back to his castle through the town square. The crowds are incensed and gather in the square to protest. Just who are those sinister grey hooded figures that lurk amongst their numbers? 

King and Assassins is an asymmetric two-player game in which one player will take on the role of the king and his knights, whilst the other plays as the citizens. Amongst the citizens lurk three hired assassins and in order to win, the people must either commit regicide or at least prevent the king from reaching his castle before the game ends. The king wins by reaching the safety of his castle, or by putting down the rebellion by eliminating all of the assassins. 

The king’s retinue starts the game in one of the two lower corners of the town square, whilst the citizens will be spread across the square on various specified spaces.  Before battle commences, the player controlling the citizens must secretly select three people to be their undercover assassins. These hired killers are the only citizens capable of slaying the king and his bodyguards.

At the beginning of each round, a randomly selected round card is drawn. This card will determine how many action points the king, assassins and citizens will be able to spend during the round. Some cards will also have a shackle icon, which means that on this turn the knights will be able to carry out the bonus action of capturing a citizen.

An overindulgence of the high life means that the king is not in the best physical condition; he has a meagre supply of action points, which can only be used to move slowly from space to space. His knights are much more athletic; they can climb onto the roofs of nearby buildings, shove back any unfortunate citizens unlucky enough to get in their way, kill a revealed assassin or possibly use shackles to capture and remove a citizen from the board. The citizens can use action points to move individuals, who can also scale buildings and drop back down to the ground. They can also choose to reveal an assassin.  Once uncovered, an assassin can eliminate a nearby knight, or if close enough, even attack the king. A first attack on the king will only wound him, but a second attack will finish him off.

The rules are simple to understand, as there is no need to remember the abilities of a mass of different unit types or special powers. The tutorial does a great job of teaching you to play using either side, although the addition of an in-game rules reference screen would have been appreciated. Graphics are bright and breezy, although things do get a little messy when units are partially obscured by buildings. Helpfully, the screen can be rotated and zoomed to ensure the optimum view of the action. The interface also works smoothly, although I did feel like selecting and moving a unit takes one more tap than is strictly necessary. Options are a bit sparse; you can play a practice game against the rather poor AI, which really only serves as a means of becoming familiar with the rules. You can try to find an online match, although opponents can be difficult to find. These matches take place in real-time, with each player having a total of twenty-five minutes to complete all of their moves. The final option is to partake in a pass and play contest. Games can be played using one of two different board layouts. The most significant difference being that one layout has an extra exit, making it easier for the king to escape.

Asymmetric board games have their own particular design challenges. Opposing sides need to feel significantly different and offer their own challenges but must also remain balanced. Furthermore, the different factions need to be equally as fun to play. I do not think that King and Assassins entirely succeeds here. The player in control of the king seems to have less strategic options, which means that turns feel rather repetitive. The knights bully the citizens out of the way and ensure that the king is guarded as he slowly makes his way to the castle but there is no real subtlety or bluffing involved. The citizens, with their covert assassins, offer a much more interesting challenge. Sneaking around, using standard citizens as red herrings and deciding when to actually pounce by revealing their hidden killers feels much more satisfying and involved.

The level of luck does sometimes sit a bit awkwardly with the game’s abstract mechanics. It is perfectly possible to get lucky and end the game within a couple of turns. The player controlling the king has no idea when the shackles are going to turn up, which means that capturing a hidden assassin often feels more a case of good fortune rather than good judgement. One thing that the game does have in its favour is a palpable feeling of tension and escalation. The king has so few action points that he cannot afford to dawdle, whilst the citizens must choose the right time to reveal their assassins, who will then immediately become vulnerable to attack.

Much like it’s straightforward, no-nonsense title, King and Assassins is an uncomplicated, quick playing board game conversion. Actually, it is a good job that the game does play quickly, as the app doesn’t save games that are in progress. It could have been a very dry abstract game of moving pieces around a board, but the theme does make sense and works rather well. There is a strong Assassins Creed vibe and the game’s background was obviously inspired by that popular series of games. Overall, it is a neat game that works well on mobile formats but unfortunately feels a little under-cooked.

Few people know that they can convert their filesystems from one type to another without losing data, i.e. non-destructively. It may sound like magic, but Fstransform can convert an ext2, ext3, ext4, jfs, reiserfs or xfs partition to another type from the list in almost any combination. More importantly, it does so in-place, without formatting or copying data anywhere. Atop of all this goodness, there is a little bonus: Fstransform can also handle ntfs, btrfs, fat and exfat partitions as well.

Before you run it

There are certain caveats and limitations in Fstransform, so it is strongly advised to back up before attempting a conversion. Additionally, there are some limitations to be aware of when using Fstransform:

• Both the source and target filesystems must be supported by your Linux kernel. Sounds like an obvious thing and exposes zero risk in case you want to use ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, jfs and xfs partitions. Fedora supports all of that just fine.
• Upgrading ext2 to ext3 or ext4 does not require Fstransform. Use the Tune2fs utility instead.
• The device with source file system must have at least 5% of free space.
• You need to be able to unmount the source filesystem before you begin.
• The more data your source file system stores, the longer the conversion will last. The actual speed depends on your device, but expect it to be around one gigabyte per minute. The large amount of hard links can also slow down the conversion.
• Although Fstransform is proved to be stable, please back up data on your source filesystem.

Installation instructions

Fstransform is already a part of Fedora. Install with the command:

sudo dnf install fstransform

Time to convert something

Converting one file system to another in-place can take a while

The syntax of the fstransform command is very simple: fstransform <source device> <target file system>. Keep in mind that it needs root privileges to run, so don’t forget to add sudo in the beginning. Here goes an example:

sudo fstransform /dev/sdb1 ext4

Note that it is not possible to convert a root file system, which is a security measure. Use a test partition or an experimental thumb drive instead. In the meantime, Fstransform will through a lot of auxiliary output in the console. The most useful part is the estimated time of completion, which keep you informed about how long  the process will take. Again, few small files on an almost empty drive will make Fstransform do its job in a minute or so, whereas more real-world tasks may involve hours of wait time.

More file systems are supported

As mentioned above, it is possible to try Fstransform with ntfs, btrfs, fat and exfat partitions. These types are very experimental, and nobody can guarantee that the converion will flow perfect. Still, there are many success stories, and you can add your own by testing Fstransform with a sample data set on a test partition. Those additional file systems can be enabled by the use of the –force-untested-file-systems parameter:

sudo fstransform /dev/sdb1 ntfs --force-untested-file-systems

Sometimes the process may iterrupt with an error. Feel free to repeat the command again — it may eventually complete the conversion from second or third attempt.

Linus Torvalds published the 4.18 kernel on Sunday, one week later than expected. This has a been a rocky release… and it’s all Android’s fault (more or less).

You see, Android systems lack tmpfs, the temporary file systems you usually see hanging off your /tmp directory. In regular Linux systems, a tmpfs is stored in memory and holds data that applications may need to retrieve at short notice or share with other programs. Instead, Android allocates a chunk of memory (called ashmem) that does the same thing. However, a change introduced to ashmem in 4.18-rc7 made the open source version of Android crash. Unfortunately, all this came to light the week before the final release of 4.18 was due. Nine patches later and the problem was still not totally resolved, so Linus decided to roll back the whole thing and wait another week for the things to calm down.

In other news, the kernel is becoming slimmer and more toned. 4.18 is actually 100 thousand lines lighter over its predecessor, 4.17. It is worth remembering that 4.17 had already shed over half a million lines of code and was the lightest in the 4.x series. As more obsolete code gets ditched, the kernel should take up less memory, run more efficiently and be less vulnerable to attacks that takes advantage of crufty old code.

Forward-thinking developers have also been working on a new __kernel_timespec structure. This will help avoid the 2038 problem hitting 32-bit systems. If you haven’t heard of this, it is similar to the year 2000 bug in that, at 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, unpatched machines will think we are back in the 1900s. Airplanes will fall from the sky, power stations will explode, and in a surprise snap referendum that nobody called for, the UK will rejoin the EU. Nonetheless, work continues apace.

Other things to look forward to in kernel 4.18:

• The 32-bit ARM architecture has gained fixes for Spectre variants 1 and 2, thus protecting a wider variety of devices from being attacked.
• The Steam Controller HID driver was merged into the kernel. This allows using Valve’s Steam Controller as a HID input device without needing to rely upon Steam or the user-space SC-Controller.
• Finally, something that Linus himself is looking forward to is seeing WireGuard included in the kernel. “Can I just state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon?” gushed Linus, while talking to David Miller, main maintainer of the networking subsystem. WireGuard is a VPN, similar to OpenVPN or IPSec, but much more efficient, according to Linus. In his words, WireGuard is “a work of art,” but, unfortunately, it has not made it into the main trunk of this time around. It does remain available as a module, notwithstanding.

You can find out more about kernel 4.18 by reading the release notes themselves, visiting Phoronix or checking the Kernel Newbies report when it becomes available.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

Tapping AI to solve the world’s big problems

Microsoft has long been known for suites of products, Smith said, and the company is now bringing that approach to a new suite of programs, AI for Good. This initiative’s first program, AI for Earth, was started in 2017 and brings advances in computer science to four environmental areas of focus: biodiversity, water, agriculture and climate change.

Under this program, Microsoft is committing $50 million over five years to provide seed grants to nongovernmental organizations, startups and researchers in more than 20 countries, Smith said. The most promising projects will receive additional funding, and Microsoft will use insights gleaned to build new products and tools. The program is already showing success, Smith said — the use of AI helped farmers in Tasmania improve their yields by 15 percent while reducing environmental runoffs. And in Singapore, AI helped reduce electrical consumption in buildings by almost 15 percent.

“We’re finding that AI, indeed, has the potential to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems,” he said.

Improving accessibility for people with disabilities

Computers can see and hear. They can tell people what’s going on around them. Those abilities position AI to help the more than one billion people worldwide who have disabilities, Smith said.

“One of the things we’ve learned over the last year is that it’s quite possible that AI can do more for people with disabilities than for any other group on the planet,” he said.

Recognizing that potential, Microsoft in May announced AI for Accessibility, a $25 million, five-year initiative focused on using AI to help people with disabilities. The program provides grants of technology, AI expertise and platform-level services to developers, NGOs, inventors and others working on AI-first solutions to improve accessibility. Microsoft is also investing in its own AI-powered solutions, such as real-time, speech-to-text transcription and predictive text functionality.

Smith pointed to Seeing AI, a free Microsoft app designed for people who are blind or have low vision, as an example of the company’s efforts. This app, which provides narration to describe a person’s surroundings, identify currency and even gauge emotions on people’s faces, has been used over four million times since being launched a year ago.

“AI is absolutely a game-changer for people with disabilities,” Smith said.

Governing AI: a Hippocratic Oath for coders?

For AI to fulfill its potential to serve humanity, it must adhere to “timeless values,” Smith said. But defining those values in a diverse world is challenging, he acknowledged. AI is “posing for computers every ethical question that has existed for people,” he said, and requires an approach that takes into account a broad range of philosophies and ethical traditions.

University students and professors have been seeking to create a Hippocratic Oath for AI, Smith said, similar to the pledge doctors take to uphold specific ethical standards. Smith said a broader global conversation about the ethics of AI is needed, and ultimately, a new legal framework.

“We’re going to have to develop these ethical principles, and we’re going to have to work through the details that sometimes will be difficult,” he said. “Because the ultimate question is whether we want to live in a future of artificial intelligence where only ethical people create ethical AI, or whether we want to live in a world where, at least to some degree, ethical AI is required and assured for all of us.

“There’s only one way to do that, and that is with a new generation of laws.”

Lead image credit:  S3studio/Getty Images

Follow Brad Smith on Twitter and LinkedIn.

By AppleInsider Staff
Monday, August 13, 2018, 02:33 pm PT (05:33 pm ET)

The latest iOS 12 beta 7 over-the-air update has been made temporarily unavailable as Apple investigates reports of unexpected performance issues associated with the release.

The company pulled access to OTA beta 7 downloads about three hours after the update went live on Monday.

While Apple has not issued a statement on the matter, developers testing the seventh iOS 12 beta have reported seemingly widespread bugs and system degradations. Common complaints include longer than normal app launch times, sluggish lock screen animations, non-functioning lock screen and Notification Center assets, and more.

Apple has apparently taken notice, pulling the OTA update from its servers. Developers still have access to the IPSW file, which is available for download and manual installation via Apple’s Developer website.

The cause of the performance issues is unknown at this time, and it is unclear when Apple intends to release a patched version of the software. The bug or bugs likely impact the release timeline of an expected public beta build.

Apple seeded iOS 12 beta 7 earlier today with minor improvements and bug fixes.

As part of its release notes, Apple announced Group FaceTime, a marquee iOS 12 and macOS Mojave feature that will allow up to 32 participants to take part in a FaceTime call, will not be ready in time for launch. The feature “has been removed from the initial release of iOS 12 and will ship in a future software update later this fall,” Apple said.