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Dell has announced it is expanding its offerings to provide customers with generative AI capabilities.  These new capabilities expand on the previously announced Project Helix, which is a collaboration with NVIDIA providing capabilities to make it easier for businesses to build generative AI models.  One of the new capabilities, Dell Validated Design, is also in partnership with NVIDIA. This is an inference blueprint that can be used to build and deploy module, secure, and scalable generative AI platforms.  Dell Professional Services also now offers new services for customers looking to adopt generative AI. For example, they can provide full-stack implementation services that are specific to an organization’s use case, such as operations or content creation. The company also revealed Dell Precision workstations, which allow developers to fine-tune their generative AI models locally. According to the company, these workstations can run AI frameworks about 80% faster than the previ

Palo Alto Networks unveiled its CI/CD Security module which aims to offer comprehensive software delivery pipeline security integrated into code-to-cloud capabilities within Prisma Cloud’s CNAPP platform.  Prisma Cloud focuses on safeguarding the CI/CD environment and effectively shielding against potential open-source vulnerabilities using software composition analysis, according to the company in a blog post .  “A major challenge in securing CI/CD pipelines is visibility. The myriad of third-party tools and applications running in development environments makes it almost impossible for security teams to determine if they are correctly configured,” said Ankur Shah, senior vice president of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks. “The integration of Cider’s capabilities secures the CI/CD environment and gives Prisma Cloud customers the ability to analyze individual tools, visualize how they interact with applications and each other, and identify and remediate risks.” The CI/CD Security

The Rust Foundation outlined many improvements to the security structure of the language and expressed its commitment to developing tools, features, and recommendations based  on security research in its Security Initiative Report .  The Rust advancements follow the White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan that signals a deep civic investment in more secure programming languages like Rust and how popular, growing languages that are perceived as “secure” need to work swiftly to address security gaps in the midst of this wider adoption. One of the core pillars of the strategy is to “promote open-source software security and the adoption of memory-safe programming languages.” Among these languages, Rust is one of the fastest-growing and most used memory-safe options.  The Rust Foundation initiated an audit of the state of security within the Rust ecosystem that  will allow both the Rust Foundation and project to anticipate risks better and define how security

The API management company Gravitee has announced new tools for API management in its latest release.  Customers will now be able to create and expose a number of types of APIs from the Gravitee API creation wizard. These include REST APIs, WebSocket APIs, Webhook subscriptions, gRPC APIs, SSE APIs, GraphQL APIs, Kafka topics, MQTT topics and Solace event APIs. The creation wizard can also now “expose Kafka, MQTT and Solace resources as REST APIs, WebSocket APIs, Webhook subscriptions and SSE APIs,” Gravitee explained. Customers can also now enforce policies at the message level. These policies can be created in the Gravitee Policy Design studio, which is also new.  In addition, the company added support for serialization and deserializatiron of information, with validation against target schemas that are stored in specific registries.  “Our vision for API management is that it becomes a healthy, competitive space where companies can choose from API and protocol-agnostic API gat

Last week, seven companies convened at the White House and committed to developing AI technology in a way that is safe, secure, and transparent.  Now, four of those companies — Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI — have announced that they have teamed up to launch the Frontier Model Forum, an industry organization dedicated to safely and responsibly developing frontier AI models. The Forum defines these as   “large-scale machine-learning models that exceed the capabilities currently present in the most advanced existing models, and can perform a wide variety of tasks,” Google explained in a blog post .  The Forum has four main objectives. First, they would like to further AI safety research so that frontier models can be developed responsibly with minimal risks. They would like these models to go through “independent, standardized evaluations of capabilities and safety.” The second goal is to identify best practices that can be provided to the public to help them understand

Stack Overflow is leveraging the millions of questions and responses on its platform to create new AI-based capabilities that can make better use of this information and provide developers with solutions to their problems faster.  “For the last fifteen years, developers have come to Stack Overflow to get a solution to a specific problem. With the rise of Generative AI, Stack Overflow’s foundation of trusted and accurate data will be central to how technology solutions are built,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. “There is no doubt that with widespread access to GenAI tools that code will be created more quickly, and the volume is likely to explode with code completion tools and the need for trust in their output will only increase for developers. Our goal with OverflowAI is to ensure developers are not only contributing to the foundation of what GenAI is today, they are also an integral part of building its future. Developers and technologists should take pride and

Last year, AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom joined forces to launch the Overture Maps Foundation and create “reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data.” Now nearly eight months later the group is releasing its first open map dataset.  The new dataset includes four data layers: places of interest (POIs), buildings, transportation network, and administrative boundaries. In total it contains data on over 59 million places around the world and 780 million unique building footprints. The transportation layer is based on data from the OpenStreetMap project and adds extra data like speed limits and real-time traffic.  The administrative boundaries layer includes national and regional administrative boundaries and this information has been translated into 40 different languages.  The data layers are formatted in the Overture Maps Foundation’s data schema, which was released last month . This will allow developers of applications using these maps to “ingest and use map d

Stable Diffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion model trained on 512×512 images from a subset of the LAION-5B database.  The model utilizes a frozen CLIP ViT-L/14 text encoder to condition its output on text prompts.  It incorporates an 860M UNet and a 123M text encoder, making it a relatively lightweight model that can run on a GPU with at least 10GB VRAM.  The training was made possible by a generous compute donation from Stability AI and support from LAION. For more details, refer to the section below and the model card. Stable Diffusion was created by a collaboration between Stability AI and Runway and since its release, Stable Diffusion has garnered significant popularity, with over 200,000 developers worldwide downloading and licensing the tool.  Additional details on the project are available here . The post SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Stable Diffusion appeared first on SD Times . from SD Times https://ift.tt/bWt0fGg

RALEIGH, NC – July 26, 2023 –   Allstacks , a leader in value stream intelligence, today announced that it has successfully renewed a Type 2 Service Organization Control (SOC 2) examination conducted by an independent auditor. The audit demonstrated that the Allstacks platform meets specific criteria for guarding the data security of its clients and their customers. SOC 2 certification provides users of the Allstacks platform with further assurance that their vital information and that of their customers is safe. “Allstacks’ SOC 2 certification underscores our commitment to customer security and data integrity. We know that any risk to data is incredibly uncomfortable for our customers. It is a point of pride for Allstacks to have no exceptions to our data security,” said Jeremy Freeman, Co-founder & CTO of Allstacks. “We want leaders to focus on improving their team without extra chores, and worrying about vendor data security is one chore we’re happy to eliminate.” Service Orga

Software management company Planview has announced Digital Product Insights, which combines portfolio management and agile planning with delivery insights from value stream management (VSM) and objectives key results (OKRs). The release is part of the company’s initiative to give companies a concrete way to break down organizational silos with a single view of shared metrics and business outcome insights. “For far too long, a black box has existed between business strategies and how software isdelivered against them,” said Razat Gaurav, CEO of Planview. “To thrive in today’s fast-paced environment, the entire C-Suite, from CEO to CFO to CTO, need shared, real-time, actionable data regarding the health of their entire organization’s business and digital transformation initiatives. Planview delivers an innovative way to leverage predictive delivery insights and sentiment details and put them back into portfolio, value stream, and team plans, helping organizations create faster feedback

Seven leading companies in the AI field on Friday voluntarily committed to help move toward the safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology. The companies include Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. “Companies that are developing these emerging technologies have a responsibility to ensure their products are safe. To make the most of AI’s potential, the Biden-Harris Administration is encouraging this industry to uphold the highest standards to ensure that innovation doesn’t come at the expense of Americans’ rights and safety,” the White House stated in a press release that contains additional details.  The companies have committed to internal and external security testing of their AI systems before their release to be carried out by independent experts and aim to guard against risks such as biosecurity and cybersecurity, as well as its broader societal effects. The companies must share information across the industry and with government

Every year, the analyst firm Forrester puts out a list of 10 emerging technologies for the year. This year, perhaps unsurprisingly, the list is packed with AI-related technologies.  “Generative AI’s dominance of this year’s list will come as a surprise to no one, given the astounding capabilities that everyone can observe in the many publicly available tools … Generative AI also topped our list because of the boost it provides to many other top emerging technologies: Automated workplace assistants (AWAs), conversational AI, and TuringBots are examples,” Brian Hopkins, VP of emerging tech portfolio at Forrester, wrote in a post .  The list is separated in three sections: short-term benefit horizon (less than two years away), medium-term benefit horizon (two to five years away), long-term benefit horizon (over five years away). Among the short-term technologies were generative AI, autonomous workplace assistants, and conversational AI. The medium-term technologies include decentrali

A few months ago GitHub revealed GitHub Copilot X, which is a major upgrade to Copilot that adds chat and voice capabilities, as well as brings the tool to other areas of development, like the command line, pull requests, and docs.   Now the company has officially launched a beta for the new chat functionality for Visual Studio and VS Code. “As the centerpiece feature of GitHub Copilot X , we believe Copilot Chat will swing the doors wide open to a new age where natural language powers the coding experience, democratizing software development as we know it and making entire teams of developers happier and more productive,” Mario Rodriguez, VP of product at GitHub, wrote in a blog post .  Copilot Chat has contextual awareness of the code a developer is working on and what error messages are being shown. It can provide code suggestions, ask questions, get explanations, offer prompts for code, and more.  According to GitHub, Copilot Chat will help cut down on context switching beca

Winglang is a unified programming model that merges infrastructure and application code within a single programming language. It can be compiled into Terraform/IaC and JavaScript, allowing for versatile usage. In Winglang, infrastructure resources hold a prominent position, being treated as first-class citizens. One of the notable features of Winglang is its ability to automatically generate IAM policies and handle various cloud mechanics seamlessly. Users can maintain their creative flow with minimal context switching and receive immediate feedback as well as have the capability to run their cloud applications in their local environments. They can also write unit tests for complete cloud architectures ensuring the quality and robustness of their code. The tool provides visualization, interaction, and debugging functionalities locally, enabling users to have a comprehensive understanding and control of their applications. Users have the flexibility to utilize any cloud service and

Grafana Labs is hoping to make it easier for companies to manage the end user experience for their applications. To achieve this, the company launched Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability , which enables companies to monitor frontend health, investigate frontend issues, resolve errors, and query, correlate, and visualize frontend telemetry in Grafana.  According to Grafana, today it’s common for frontend applications to run more of their code on the end users’ device. Since users can be accessing the app from various devices, browsers, and operating systems, or even while on different internet bandwidths, ensuring compatibility is a challenge.  The new solution will measure and report on Web Vitals like Time to First Byte, Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. This data can be “sliced and diced” across any dimension, depending on what matters most to the business. It can also be useful in determining how different users interact with the app. To

At Microsoft Inspire , Microsoft’s annual event where it highlights what it has achieved with different partners, the company made several announcements related to AI.  First, it announced pricing for its upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot offering. The feature will cost $30 per user per month, on top of normal Microsoft 365 pricing.  “While some generative AI apps focus on a single capability, like real-time transcription or copywriting, Microsoft 365 Copilot puts thousands of skills at your command. By grounding answers in business data like your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings and contacts, and combining them with your working context – the meeting you’re in now, the emails you’ve exchanged on a topic, the chats you had last week – Copilot delivers richer, more relevant and more actionable responses to your questions,” Frank X. Shaw, chief communications officer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .  The company also announced Bing Chat Enterprise, which allows companie

JetBrains is trying to make it easier for developers to produce quality code with the release of its new platform, Qodana. Qodana is a tool that offers static code analysis and can be integrated within the CI/CD pipeline. This allows problems in code to be addressed from right within the IDE.  It currently supports over 60 languages and can be integrated with most CI pipelines, such as JetBrains TeamCity, Space, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and GitLab CI. It also integrates with many of JetBrains’ IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PhpStorm, PyCharm, Rider and GoLand. According to a study by Harris Poll and the payment processing company Stripe, developers are spending an average of 42% of their time dealing with technical debt and maintainance issues. By addressing issues before they turn into technical debt, Qodana can save companies money and time.  The tool was first introduced in 2021 and has been in preview since. Now it is generally available, and a number of new feature

LEAD Technology, which is a company that provides various toolkits for developers, has announced the release of LEADTOOLS Version 22. The latest release adds full support for Python, allowing Python developers to use LEADTOOLS libraries such as Recognition , Document , Multimedia , and Imaging .  These provide access to technologies like imaging processing, OCR, barcode recognition, and forms processing. According to the company, their website contains full tutorials for using these.  The company explained that with the addition of Python, developers will be able to leverage the language for things like scientific computing, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and web development.  “Our goal is to have LEADTOOLS in the hands of all developers, enabling them to integrate powerful features and build better applications. We are excited to offer full Python support in our latest V22 update, expanding our product line to a wider range of developers,” said Rich Little, president

The DevSecOps provider Digital.ai has announced new capabilities to its platform to provide customers with better predictive analytics across the software development life cycle.  New predictive intelligence features include Flow Acceleration, which predicts development cycle times; Quality Improvement, which provides early detection of defects; Change Risk Prediction, which identifies risky changes, reduces change failure, and manages risk before production; and Service Management Process Optimization, which can be used to anticipate future service risks.  The company is also providing capabilities that will help companies manage the impact or risk of generative AI, such as scoring methods for ranking code changes that have higher risks, workflow templates based on industry best practices, and policies and regulatory controls.  The company also teased upcoming features that use generative AI. Test Creation will make it easy to create and update test cases based on feature requireme

Google has announced the general availability of new APIs for Chat for Google Workspace developers.  The API allows developers to build applications that integrate with Chat. These applications could allow conversations held in Chat to include details or link previews. As an example, Google explained that issues could be created or managed in Jira for Google Chat without the user needing to leave Chat. The API includes a number of resources and methods, including, Spaces, Members, Messages, Reactions, and Media and Attachments.  Google also shared how one of its customers, LumApps, is making use of the API. Its employees can start a Google Chat right from their employee directory, making it easy to start conversations when searching for people by job title, department, or other attributes.  Developers who partake in Google’s Developer Preview program can also now access a new feature that allows Chat apps to import user data. The benefits of importing data directly this way include

SOMERVILLE, Mass. — July 18, 2023 —  SmartBear , a leading provider of software development and visibility tools, released real user monitoring (RUM) in  BugSnag , the company’s observability and application stability solution, that delivers production visibility insights to developers as they monitor and improve their applications with digital experience monitoring. These new capabilities enable application teams to rapidly identify and prioritize performance issues in production with the context required for faster resolution and quicker application development. “Performance issues in mobile and web applications can seriously impact end user satisfaction and ultimately the successful adoption of your product,” said Anthony Bryce, Vice President of Product Management at SmartBear. “To be successful, development teams must continually observe and optimize the performance of their applications. As developers take on more responsibilities to understand the impact of poor user experience

As technology stacks become more complex and companies rely on infrastructure as code to manage their systems, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure the quality of not just the product, but the entire user experience. In order to do this effectively, testing teams must look beyond their product to understand and optimize the entire ecosystem that supports it. Any number of third-party vendors or service disruptions can affect the user experience, and no matter the root cause, users will almost certainly associate a negative experience with the product. Traditionally, testing teams operate in a silo and focus solely on their product. The supply chain industry, in particular, has undergone a digital transformation in recent years. Technology stacks are constantly growing deeper and more varied. Supply chain and fulfillment software must integrate with multiple sales channels, Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) , and booking platforms in addition to the usual software techno

The website builder Wix.com announced plans to launch its new AI Site Generator, which will be accompanied by a range of AI-powered capabilities, many of which are already accessible to users. This will give Wix users AI technology that significantly simplifies the entire process of website building, design, and management. The generator will also provide more automated tools for users to operate and expand their businesses with unprecedented ease. The AI Site Generator allows Wix users to specify their goals, which the system then uses to instantly produce a bespoke, professional website. This custom website comes fully equipped with a homepage, inner pages replete with text and images, and any business-specific solutions like Stores, Bookings, Restaurants, Events, and more.  “We are fully committed to bringing our users fully-integrated innovations, such as the AI Site Generator, that have excellent user experiences to ultimately drive forward the next generation of website creati

The software intelligence company CAST has announced updates in its CAST Highlight summer 2023 release to help companies keep better track of the open-source software (OSS) components they are using in their applications. “In the world of software development, integrating OSS components into your business-critical application is akin to entrusting the health and stability of your project to them,” said Greg Rivera, vice president of CAST Highlight. “Understanding their lifespan status—whether they are active, possibly end-of-life, or conversely too new—is an important aspect of OSS governance, and we’re thrilled to offer software intelligence technology that safely automates the analysis process.” The release includes Open-Source Component Lifespan Insights, which tells application owners whether their components are active, deprecated, or immature.  Lifespan is determined by release date. Components will get tagged as “Active” if there has been a new release in the past five years,

Bard has announced its largest expansion yet, now offering services in the majority of the world and in over 40 languages including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi, and Spanish. The expansion extends to new regions such as Brazil and parts of Europe.  Bard is introducing new features to enhance user customization, foster creativity, and improve productivity. The company has consulted with AI experts, policymakers, and privacy regulators as part of its responsible AI expansion strategy.  They pledge to continue to respect their AI principles, heed user feedback, and take measures to ensure data privacy and protection as they further extend Bard’s reach and language availability. Bard has introduced new updates aimed at better serving users’ needs. First, it now offers an audio feature allowing users to listen to Bard’s responses, useful for tasks such as learning pronunciation or listening to poems/scripts. This feature is available in over 40 languages.  Second, Bard now allows user

Deci, a deep learning company that uses artificial intelligence to develop AI, recently announced the launch of DataGradients . This open-source tool is designed to profile computer vision datasets and find essential insights. In computer vision, the effectiveness of an AI model is deeply connected to the quality of the training data. Therefore, identifying any issues within the dataset is vital as it not only aids practitioners in avoiding training obstacles but also highlights potential reasons for a model’s underperformance, Deci explained.  According to the company, a comprehensive understanding of a dataset’s attributes can simplify crucial decisions such as choosing the most suitable model, the best loss function, and the optimal optimization method. “DataGradients empowers data scientists to streamline their model development and training process, with crystal-clear visibility into their data. With DataGradients, we’ve made it that much easier to extract actionable insights

JFrog has announced the introduction of JFrog Curation, an automated DevSecOps solution designed to thoroughly inspect and block contaminated open-source or third-party software packages and their respective dependencies before they enter a company’s software development environment.  JFrog Curation, which is integrated with JFrog Artifactory, uses binary metadata for the identification of high-risk packages with high-severity CVEs as well as operational or license compliance issues. This eliminates the need to download each package for scanning before use, thereby maintaining developer speed and convenience. “A lot of companies don’t have control. And because of the need for speed, developers are pulling down all kinds of packages from NPM, Maven, and Go. The other bad option is, ‘Hey, I can place a whole bunch of restrictions on my software development team, but it’s gonna kill my software development velocity so I have to figure out a way to enable my development team without slow

Google is always working to improve privacy and transparency in Google Play so that users can be trustful of the place where they download all their Android apps. To that end, the company has just announced a number of updates, such as expanded developer verification requirements and new policies for developers wishing to offer blockchain-based content in their apps. Developers will now be required to provide a D-U-N-S number when creating a developer account in the Play Console. D-U-N-S numbers are unique numbers provided by Dun & Bradstreet that are commonly used in verifying businesses.  Google is also renaming the “Contact details” section in store listings to “App support.” In App Support there will be a new section labeled “About the developer” where end users can learn more about the developer of the app they are downloading. Developers can choose to show information like their website or support phone number.   These new requirements will be in effect starting August 31

With a 742% average annual increase in software supply chain attacks  reported by Sonatype , application security has become a top concern for businesses. Today Vaadin is excited to announce  AppSec Kit , a new Acceleration Kit designed to enhance the security of your web applications built with Vaadin. AppSec Kit is currently available for Vaadin 7 and Vaadin 8 and will be included with Extended Maintenance and with Ultimate subscriptions. We plan to offer AppSec Kit for additional versions of Vaadin later this year. With AppSec Kit, developers can now easily identify and manage vulnerabilities within their open-source dependencies directly from Vaadin Development Tools. Because AppSec Kit identifies vulnerabilities in the local development environment, even before code is checked in, developers can resolve issues more quickly and with less friction, resulting in saved time and money. False positives frequently cause frustration for developers, often leading to wasted time and effor

GitHub’s merge queue aims to end congestion on a team’s most active branches. According to the company, by enabling merge queue, the need to hurry and merge pull requests before others do is no longer a concern. This feature is now generally available and is accessible to any team that is part of a managed organization with public repositories and GitHub Enterprise Cloud users. They can activate this feature on their respective repositories and start streamlining their team’s pull requests immediately.  The merge queue is specifically designed for high-performance teams in which multiple users regularly commit to a single branch. According to GitHub, before the introduction of the merge queue, engineers had to try merging directly onto an already active branch, potentially leading to code conflicts and a repetitive cycle of rework. GitHub’s merge queue eliminates that possibility by creating a temporary branch that includes the latest changes from the base branch, the changes from o

The Flatfile Data Exchange Platform was released as a set of APIs, open-source plugins, and event streams that allow developers to use the building blocks of Flatfile to solve nearly any data exchange problem. The company, Flatfile, was founded in response to the common frustrations associated with handling file imports. The founders experienced the challenges of dealing with incorrect dates and inconsistent, incorrect formats in customer-uploaded files. Recognizing the chaotic nature of importing data files, they set out to create a better solution. Initially offering an embeddable CSV importer, Flatfile received a positive reception from companies experiencing similar pain points.  As the company grew, it realized that simply validating and cleaning data was not enough. Customers expressed the need for a more comprehensive solution that could handle complex scenarios, involving multiple stakeholders and requiring intricate workflows and human intervention, according to the company

DORA metrics have become the de facto standard for measuring software development and delivery success, but a study last month identifies where those measures alone were lacking. The first-ever Engineering Benchmarks Report, recently released by software delivery management platform provider LinearB, provides insights from 1,500 organizations into what makes one DevOps team more effective than another, and what sets the top tier of development teams apart from the rest. RELATED: LinearB’s Engineering Benchmarks Report The four key DORA metrics look at deployment frequency, lead time for changes (cycle time), change failure rate, and mean time to recovery. Ori Keren, co-founder and CEO of LinearB, says those metrics helped DevOps teams move “from darkness to visibility.”  But organizations that only track DORA metrics, he said, can miss the business implications of the software work being done. Keren explained: “I like this analogy to a car and an engine. The engine could be workin