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Showing posts from March, 2023

Google attempting to combat spread of misinformation with new Search features

Google announced five new ways to help users find accurate information more easily and to combat the spread of misinformation online. One improvement is the “About this result” feature soon available in all languages where Search is offered. This feature aims to help users assess information and its origin.  When searching on Google, users will notice three dots located next to most of the results, which will lead to more details about the source of the information and how Google’s systems have determined its relevance to their query. This will provide users with additional context that can aid in making an informed decision on which sites to visit and which results are the most beneficial to their needs. Secondly, Google is also aiming to bring more voices into Search with an upcoming feature called Perspectives. The feature appears as a carousel that appears below Top Stories and showcases insights on the search topic from a range of people, including j ournalists, experts, and ot

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: OSC&R Software Supply Chain Attack Matrix

The OSC&R (Open Software Supply Chain Attack Reference) is an open source framework used for understanding and evaluating existing threats to entire software supply chain security. OSC&R was created to establish a standard language and structure for comprehending and evaluating the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) utilized by attackers to breach the security of software supply chains.  The goal is to provide the security community with a unified resource to evaluate their own approaches for securing software supply chains in advance and compare solutions, according to the framework’s founding members.  “In one episode of Star Trek, while working on vulnerabilities of the Enterprise in relation to the threat actor, Mr. Spock said, ‘Insufficient facts always invite danger, Captain!’ The same certainly holds true in cybersecurity, where a lack of information increases vulnerability. By increasing the community’s knowledge, OSC&R holds tremendous potential to mitig

CloudBees announces integration with Argo Rollouts to improve Kubernetes deployments

CloudBees , the software delivery platform for enterprises, today introduced its integration of the company’s continuous delivery and release orchestration solution CloudBees CD/RO with the Kubernetes controller Argo Rollouts.  This integration is geared at strengthening a user’s ability to deliver high quality software quickly and at scale in cloud-native environments.  CloudBees customers gain access to Argo Rollouts’ deployment capabilities, allowing them to promote new application versions with reduced downtime, distribute controlled software updates, and test new versions of code in real-world environments prior to release. Additionally, Argo Rollouts is compatible with existing manifests and CRDs so that users do not have to change any tools in order to use these deployment strategies. “This integration of CloudBees CD/RO with Argo Rollouts is a continuation of our commitment to best-in-class open-source tools that empower our customers in their software delivery journey,” sa

Charmed Kubeflow 1.7 adds support for serverless ML workloads

Canonical, the publishers of the Ubuntu operating system, have announced the latest version of Charmed Kubeflow , its open-source MLOps platform. Charmed Kubeflow 1.7 adds the ability to run serverless ML workloads, which increases developer productivity by reducing routine tasks and handling infrastructure for them. Another win for developers is that new dashboards will improve user experience and make infrastructure monitoring easier.  This release also introduces new AI capabilities, such as the addition of KServe for model serving and new frameworks for model serving, like NVIDIA Triton. Support has been added for PaddlePaddle , which is a platform for developing deep learning models.  The Katib component has also been updated with a new UI that reduces the amount of low-level commands that are needed to find correlations between logs. Katib also has a new Tune API, which makes it easier to build tuning experiments and simplifies how trial metrics can be accessed.  “With

Google outlines four principles for responsible AI

With all the uptake over AI technology like GPT over the past several months, many are thinking about the ethical responsibility in AI development. According to Google, responsible AI means not just avoiding risks, but also finding ways to improve people’s lives and address social and scientific problems, as these new technologies have applications in predicting disasters, improving medicine, precision agriculture, and more.  “We recognize that cutting-edge AI developments are emergent technologies — that learning how to assess their risks and capabilities goes well beyond mechanically programming rules into the realm of training models and assessing outcomes,” Kent Walker, president of global affairs for Google and Alphabet, wrote in a blog post .  Google has four AI principles that it believes are crucial to successful AI responsibility.  First, there needs to be education and training so that teams working with these technologies understand how the principles apply to their wor

Twilio’s newest solution enables use of more complete customer data profiles

Customer engagement company Twilio has announced the launch of Segment Unify , which is an identity resolution solution. It enables companies to merge the history of each of their customers into a single profile. They can sync these profiles to their data warehouse and other customer experience tools, while Segment Unify remains the source of truth for a profile.  Profiles sent to the data warehouse can be further enriched by data from systems of record. Golden profiles can also be used as training data for AI systems so that campaigns are as up to date and effective as possible. For example, if a model is not updated in real-time, it’s possible that a customer could get targeted by an ad for a product they’ve already purchased, so complete and accurate profiles are needed to ensure these models are current. According to Twilio, Segment Unify will help increase the lifetime value of customers by delivering personalized communications. The company recently released a report that cla

Google is partnering with Replit to provide AI-assisted IDE

Replit announced a partnership with Google Cloud to provide cloud infrastructure and services to Replit users. Standalone chat LLMs don’t have a project’s context and can’t be used to their full potential until they’re brought into an IDE, according to the Replit team in a blog post . The new partnership with Google Cloud aims to solve this.  Replit is a popular online coding platform that allows users to write and run code in various programming languages, collaborate with others, and host their projects on the platform.  While Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative coding platform, Replit will gain access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit’s software development AI. Using Ghostwriter, developers can create full websites in minutes without any coding experience. They can deploy and scale their applications with a few clicks and get Google Cloud’s reliability, security, and other benefits

What’s new in generative AI: GPT-4 | ChatGPT conversation history bug | ChatGPT plugins

Since our last roundup , lots of new things have been happening around GPT and ChatGPT, and in particular OpenAI, the creator of the technology, has unveiled many new offerings.  Here are some of the highlights surrounding these new AI technologies from the past few weeks. GPT-4 launches Perhaps the biggest news was OpenAI unveiling GPT-4 , which included significant improvements from GPT-3.5. An example of the improvements is that GPT-4 passes a simulated bar exam with a score that is in the top 10% of those who took the test, while GPT-3.5 was in the bottom 10% of scores when it took the test.  GPT-4 can accept images as well as text as input. An example OpenAI shared is a user giving a photo of a phone with a VGA cable plugged into it instead of a normal charging cable and asking what is funny with the photo. The response: “A smartphone with a VGA connector (a large, blue, 15-pin connector typically used for computer monitors) plugged into its charging port … The humor in thi

Fairwinds Introduces Automated Fix Pull Requests to Streamline Remediation of Kubernetes Misconfigurations

  Fairwinds , the leading provider of software for Kubernetes platform engineers to standardize and enable development best practices, today announced Automated Fix Pull Requests (PRs), the newest Fairwinds Insights feature. With Automated Fix PRs, development teams can automatically fix Kubernetes misconfigurations, which have worsened   year-over-year , resulting in increased security risks, potential for downtime, and wasted costs. Developers are focused on quickly shipping new features and rely on automation to build, scan and deploy their code. When a problem, such as a security bug or policy violation, is found, Automated Fix PRs immediately kick-starts remediation by providing code-level fixes to common Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) issues found in Kubernetes manifests. Multiple IaC issues can be fixed with a single click, and all changes can be quickly reviewed and approved within GitHub. A recent Fairwinds analysis of IaC scans shows that Automated Fix PRs can remediate at lea

How to Declare a Variable in SQL and Assign a Value? Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

SQL is a language that is used to manage relational databases. It provides a facility for easily declaring and using variables. We can use variables for storing temporary values in memory for performing calculations. In SQL variables can be used in the same way we use in any other programming language. SQL Declare Variable In SQL we use DECLARE statements for declaring variables. Let’s see its syntax: Syntax: DECLARE @variable_name data_type; The above syntax is self explanatory so no need to explain. Example: DECLARE @marks int; Here I have declared a variable with the name marks and type int . SQL Assign Variable I hope you got the idea about declaring variables now let’s have a look at how to assign some value. Syntax: SET @variable_name = value; The SET statement is used for assigning some value to a variable in SQL. Example: SET @marks = 80; As we declared a variable and assigned a value to it, now let’s take a look at how to use it with a SELECT statement. SEL

Quality assurance assures great user experiences

The user experience has become critically important in today’s digital world, even as organizations struggle to align testing with the speed of delivery. Functional tests, performance tests and UI tests, among others, can reveal if an application isn’t behaving or performing as expected. But on their own, they can’t tell you if your user is having a great experience. And as we know, a poor experience can lead to losing customers and revenue, as well as  damage your company’s reputation. To ensure a good user experience, organizations need to understand their products, they need to know their markets and they need to have empathy for their users. Once that’s established, according to Gevorg Hovsepyan, head of product at test automation platform mabl, you need to make sure your testing strategy aligns with that. “You need to have a good pulse on what your customers are experiencing, and the quality of that,” Hovsepyan said. “Because ultimately, your goal is to deliver a great customer

Financial Institutions Accelerate by 40% Software Time to Market

Parasoft, a global leading provider of software testing solutions, will be showcasing Parasoft Virtualize, its industry-leading service virtualization solution, at the upcoming QA Financial Forum in Chicago on April 4. Building on the recent QA Financial report, Parasoft is sponsoring this year’s Chicago event and expanding its presence in the financial application testing space. Automated software testing experts will be available to engage with financial organizations and share expertise on risk reduction and cost savings. Download the QA Financial report , which draws from data provided by more than 20 financial institutions and the experiences of Bank of America and ING, to learn how service virtualization has been proven to save development time and increase software quality. Parasoft’s service virtualization technology has delivered measurable results and ROI for financial organizations such as ING and Bank of America. The recent QA Financial report recognizes Parasoft as a le

The Chat GPT API is a wakeup call to use these 5 key performance metrics

The release of the Chat GPT and Whisper APIs this month sparked a frenzy of creative activity among developers, allowing many companies to build generative AI capabilities into their apps for the first time. Numerous businesses have rushed to add generative AI features to their products, including Salesforce, HubSpot, ThoughtSpot , Grammarly, and others. This provides a great way for businesses to differentiate their software – but only if the user experience is a good one. The generative AI function is at the core of the new offerings, but also critical is the overall end user experience with the app. If you throw a quickly-developed new app in the hands of your users, how can you be sure the performance will be optimal? For a reminder of the negative impact a poor user experience can have, just recall the problems Ticketmaster had in November when Taylor Swift’s concert tickets went on sale. Fans of the pop idol (including me!) swamped the Ticketmaster website and brough

Buildkite adds native Kubernetes support in latest update

The CI/CD platform Buildkite has announced its first quarterly release of the year.  With this release, the company announced the Kubernetes agent stack, bringing native Kubernetes support to the platform. Users can now run Buildkite CI/CD agents on Kubernetes, where they can take advantage of the expertise of their platform teams and see increased flexibility.  This release also continues on with Buildkite’s goal of offering a CI/CD platform that integrates with  companies’ existing security tooling and does not access secrets or source code.  Buildkite has added support for OpenID Connect , which is a security standard for identification in federated systems that builds on the OAuth 2.0 framework. The platform also recently achieved SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.  The company has also added a flaky test tracker, which shows which tests are the least reliable in the Test Analytics UI. This will help reduce time spent checking for bugs and failures, and also reduce frustration among t

JetBrains introduces IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1 to offer improved performance

The intelligent productivity company JetBrains today released IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1 , the latest version of its integrated development environment for Java. This release provides users with new features and improvements, including an updated UI to offer a more polished experience.  The performance enhancements provide users with accelerated startup experience and an improved commit process with background commit checks. With IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1, customers get improvements for the new UI, which has been overhauled based on user feedback. This brings users Compact Mode to offer a more consolidated look and feel of the IDE, the option to vertically split the tool window area, a reworked Run widget, and more. The IDE startup experience has been improved through the performance of the Scanning files to index process in smart mode. With this, the IDE’s full functionality becomes available earlier in the startup process.  IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1 also uses existing caches from previous sessi

Code in the fast lane: Why secure developers can ship at warp speed

Skills verification has been a facet of our lives for most of the modern era, granting us validity and opening doors that wouldn’t otherwise be available. Driving, for example, is an important rite of passage for most, and we’re expected to pass a set of standardized assessments to confirm that we can be trusted with a four-thousand-pound machine, capable of traveling over a hundred miles an hour. Mistakes, especially at speed, can cost you that privilege, or even a human life. But what if, for some, driving is more than a day-to-day convenience, and it becomes an elite profession? A person can continue their upskilling journey and potentially become an F1 driver, where they are permitted to operate machines that go faster than any civilian could realistically handle without a huge likelihood of error at high speeds.  To that end, it seems baffling that most developers who work on code that powers critical infrastructure, automobiles, medical tech, and everything in between, do so w

Microsoft Teams has been redesigned to offer increased speed

Microsoft recently announced the public preview of the new Microsoft Teams App for Windows in order to deliver up to two times faster performance while only using half of the memory. The user experience has been improved so that it is easier to locate everything in one place. The company stated that these enhancements also work to build the foundation for Microsoft’s AI-powered experiences, such as Copilot for Microsoft Teams. In an effort to bring users heightened speed, Microsoft has made a ground-up investment to overhaul the platform to provide speed and performance improvements for data, network, chat, and video architecture. Enhancements have also been made to the core experience of Teams that are geared at simplifying the way customers stay on top of notifications, search for information, manage messages, and organize channels.  Furthermore, Microsoft has improved the Teams authentication model, synchronization, and notification system to offer users a more consistent expe

LaunchDarkly Establishes Technology Partner Program to Answer the Demand for Feature Management Technology

LaunchDarkly , the leader in feature management, today announced it has relaunched a Technology Partner Program as it dedicates more resources and strategy to partners that want to build integrations into LaunchDarkly’s products. Companies that join LaunchDarkly’s Technology Partner Program will receive exclusive benefits such as early access to LaunchDarkly’s technology, marketing support to increase awareness and adoption of the integration, and enablement resources. Additionally, there are three tiers within the program that partners can move between depending on customer adoption, which in turn enables partners to be upgraded within their tier and to unlock additional benefits. The Technology Partner Program is available to those companies that seek to build an integration into LaunchDarkly’s product. More details about requirements to join and benefits of the program can be found on the company’s partner integrations page .“As the feature management category pioneer and leader,

How to level up your low-code game

At the end of 2022, Gartner made the prediction that in 2023, low-code spending would increase by 20%. This may seem like a bold claim, considering that lately it seems that all organizations want to do is cut, cut, cut. But when you think about the promise of low-code, and being able to do more with less, it makes sense. Low-code and no-code tools enable development teams to speed up their time to market by reducing the amount of code that needs to be written, enabling reusable code blocks, and automating things like testing and security. Though we at SD Times primarily cover the software development industry, low-code cannot be confined to just one department. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of the user base for low-code tools will be non-IT users. These days, you can find low-code tooling in the hands of accountants, HR professionals, business analysts, and more.  Clearly, low code has proven its worth. That’s why, for the third year in a row, we’re hosting Low-Cod

Report: The major challenges for development teams in 2023

Finding developers with the right set of skills for the job will continue to be a major challenge for businesses in 2023.  The US Department of Labor is estimating that there will be a shortage of 85.2 million developers by 2030, and over a third of respondents to Reveal’s latest survey on development struggles said that they are continuing to struggle with finding developers that have the necessary skills.  According to Reveal, companies are attempting to overcome the skills challenge by adopting new technologies that will lower demand on developers, such as low-code tools. Using low-code tools has solved the challenges associated with the developers skills shortage in 76% of organizations, according to the report.  “This approach is helping alleviate the demand for developers by reducing the need for heavy hand-coding in areas like screen design, UX flows, theming, and branding and can all but eliminate the need for manual HTML & CSS tweaking,” the report states. The surve

Torc acquires Codealike to provide developers with more data for their job searches

The developer talent network Torc announced the acquisition of the coding performance measurement application Codealike to offer developers more data that increases skills, job opportunities, and enterprise value. “Torc aims to empower developers with data and intelligence, protect IP, increase upskilling and career opportunities, and make the remote workforce indispensable. Understanding performance data is the best way to do that,” said Michael P. Morris, CEO and co-founder of Torc.  The acquisition and the features that result from it are aimed at tackling technical debt which cost companies tens of billions of dollars per year, according to Torc. According to Gartner, companies that find ways to reduce tech debt will lower service delivery times by at least 50%. Torc has developed new features for Codealike that aim to improve developer productivity and help maximize their career and earning potential. These features take a human-centered approach and provide personalized co

Zendesk and AWS announce partnership to offer more personalized customer service at scale

Cloud-based customer service company Zendesk today announced a five-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS in order to help organizations offer personalized customer experiences at scale. The partnership is geared at assisting businesses in providing users with accelerated, tailored, and conversational experiences spanning every channel while also working to enhance support operations with AI tools, bots, and analytics. According to the companies, by improving customer experience, businesses can remain competitive, gain customer loyalty, and adapt to the conditions of the market as it changes and evolves.  “Zendesk has been both a member of the AWS Partner Network and a customer for many years, leveraging our cloud services to create innovative customer and employee experience solutions for customers,” said Ruba Borno, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at AWS. “This strategic collaboration agreement with Zendesk allows companies to personalize experiences u

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Semantic Kernel

Semantic Kernel (SK) is a lightweight SDK from Microsoft aimed at enabling integration of AI Large Language Models with conventional programming languages.  According to the project’s GitHub page , the SK extensible programming model brings together natural language semantic functions, traditional code native functions, and embeddings-based memory in order to access new potential and add value to apps with AI. SK was designed to support and include design patterns from recent AI research, allowing developers to enrich their applications with complicated skills such as prompt chaining, recursive reasoning, and summarization. Furthermore, users can infuse their apps with zero/few-shot learning, contextual memory, long-term memory, embeddings, semantic indexing, planning, and accessing external knowledge stores as well as the users own data.    “By joining the SK community, you can build AI-first apps faster and have a front-row peek at how the SDK is being built. SK has been relea

Encapsulation and Decapsulation in Networking Jitendra Ajmera The Crazy Programmer

In today’s era Network or Internet is used to send and receive data worldwide. As we know the network is a complex structure consisting of lots of computers and networking devices. The system which seeks data is known as the Client and the system which provides the data is known as Host . Also, we know that the TCP/IP and OSI models are the models which are used most. Both use layer architecture. Layer Architecture of TCP/IP and OSI Model Before transmission data moves between these layered architectures. Encapsulation and decapsulation are two processes used in this layered architecture. It’s like Boxing and Unboxing a real-world object for sent over courier. We can’t send any data directly on the internet. There are lots of things to do before transmission, like establish host to host communication, provides source and destination IP addresses etc. Fortunately, we as a user do not need to do any chores. The Network model does the credits. All we need to do is to just select