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Showing posts from September, 2023

NSA to open AI Security Center

The National Security Agency (NSA) has announced it is creating an AI Security Center to “oversee the development and integration of artificial intelligence capabilities within U.S. national security systems.” The new center will help foster development of best practices, evaluation methodology, and risk frameworks related to using AI in national security. The NSA will consolidate all of its AI and security-related activities to happen in the AI Security Center.   The NSA will work closely with commercial companies, national labs, academia, the Department of Defense, and select foreign partners on this initiative.  “AI will be increasingly consequential for national security in diplomatic, technological and economic matters for our country and our allies and partners,” said Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the NSA.  “Today, the U.S. leads in this critical area, but this lead should not be taken for granted,” he said. “Our adversaries, who have for decades used theft and exploita

Amazon’s tool for building generative AI apps is now generally available

Amazon has announced that its solution for building generative AI applications is now generally available. Announced in April of this year, Amazon Bedrock enables companies to utilize foundation models from companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Stability AI, and Amazon to build applications. These models can be further customized on customer data using techniques such as fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation.  According to Amazon, some potential use cases for apps created using the tool include text generation, virtual assistants, search, text summarization, and image generation.  The solution is serverless, which means that customers won’t have to manage underlying infrastructure. This also makes it easy to deploy generative AI capabilities across other AWS services, the company explained. For monitoring and governance, Amazon Bedrock has integrations with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail.  Amazon notes that while the solution is generally available, there a

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Wolfi

The primary goal behind Wolfi, which was announced a year ago, is to create secure, hardened containers with zero known CVEs, according to the project maintainers in a post .  Since its release, the team of maintainers at Chainguard, along with community contributors, has been focused on aiding developers in addressing software supply chain security challenges. They achieved this by offering a foundational platform for building software securely from the outset. “I use Wolfi mainly on Windows Subsystem for Linux, so my point of view is quite different from the typical use case, however the reason I do it is the same: security. Wolfi forces me to think differently, in a good and secure way, when it comes to package selection and ultimately, I can apply this knowledge when creating new containerized applications,” said Nuno do Carmo, technical writer at SUSE and Wolfi Community Member. In the past year, Wolfi has made significant progress, boasting over 1,300 package configurations i

Company behind Grace Hopper Conference, AnitaB.org, launches DEI consulting firm

AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that puts on the Grace Hopper Conference every year, has announced it is launching a new consulting division called AnitaB.org Advisory .  The new division will provide consulting for companies and communities looking to improve their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices.  According to AnitaB.org, it will provide a systematic approach customized to each company’s specific needs that will take into account business strategy, workforce profile, cultural values, and consumer markets when coming up with plans for an organization.  The company has been working with and supporting women and non-binary technologists for the past 25 years, which gives it a unique perspective into what is needed in the industry and how to bring about change. The new division will be led by Bo Young Lee, a human capital, DEI, and ESG executive with 23 years of experience with this sort of work. Previously, she was Uber’s first chief DEI officer and before that held role

Kong announces managed service to run Kong Gateways and Kong Insomnia 8.0

The API company Kong has announced a new managed service for running Kong Gateways so developers don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure.  The new service, Dedicated Cloud Gateways, is a part of Kong Konnect , the company’s API management platform.  “At Kong, we enable any company to become an API-first company — speeding up time to  market, creating new business opportunities, and delivering superior products and services,”  said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong. “Dedicated Cloud Gateways makes it even  easier for businesses and builders to quickly harness the power of Kong Gateway, the world’s  most adopted API gateway. It is the best of both worlds: serverless-like usage that is 1-click for  ease of use, while running on fully dedicated multi-cloud and multi-region infrastructure that  delivers the best performance and the lowest latency at all times. It truly is the easiest way to  deploy modern API infrastructure.” According to Kong, there are no se

Workday announces AI capabilities for improving developer and general employee experience

Workday, a provider of cloud applications for finance and HR, has unveiled substantial improvements to its no-code platform, Workday Extend.  These enhancements, introduced at the Workday Rising customer conference, comprise the Workday AI Gateway, advanced developer tools from AWS, and a user-friendly no-code/low-code toolkit. These upgrades are designed to enhance the developer experience and boost business and IT efficiency and innovation. Workday Extend enables organizations to create tailored finance and HR solutions. It’s introducing the Workday AI Gateway, which grants developers access to AI and ML services. This includes Skills Analysis, which compares and extracts relevant skills from text using Workday Skills Cloud, Sentiment Analysis that determines the emotional tone of digital text messages, and Document Intelligence, which extracts business-relevant data from documents like resumes. Also ML Forecaster provides time series predictions based on historical data. These A

Cloudflare releases platform for AI inference

Cloudflare has launched Workers AI, a solution designed to provide the necessary infrastructure for efficiently and cost-effectively scaling and deploying AI models, catering to the upcoming generation of AI applications. The company has established strategic partnerships to offer GPU access on its global network, enabling low-latency AI inference near users. Paired with the Data Localization Suite, Workers AI helps customers prepare for emerging compliance regulations related to AI.  Cloudflare’s privacy-centric approach ensures that data used for inference remains separate from training LLMs. Additionally, Cloudflare provides a model catalog to assist developers in various AI use cases, such as LLM, speech-to-text, image classification, and sentiment analysis. “Cloudflare has all the infrastructure developers need to build scalable AI-powered applications, and can now provide AI inference as close to the user as possible. We’re investing to make it easy for every developer to have

Canonical announces general availability of Charmed MLFlow

Canonical has officially released Charmed MLFlow, their version of the well-known machine learning platform. Charmed MLFlow is designed for tasks like model registry and experiment tracking and seamlessly integrates with AI and big data tools like Apache Spark and Kubeflow.  It’s flexible and can be deployed on various infrastructure types, from workstations to public and private clouds. It’s available through Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with pricing based on nodes and support options. This solution offers robust developer features and commits to ten years of security maintenance. “MLFlow has become the leading AI framework for streamlining all ML stages. Its popularity arises from its flexibility in facilitating modest local desktop experimentation and extensive cloud deployment, catering to both individual and enterprise needs”, said Cedric Gegout, VP of product management at Canonical. “This made Charmed MLFlow a fitting addition to our Canonical MLOps suite, offering cos

MongoDB announces new database capabilities to improve developer experience

At an event MongoDB held in London today, the company announced a number of product announcements, including updates to Atlas, a new edge platform, and more.  According to MongoDB, developers’ time is an organization’s “most precious commodity.” Therefore, the company would like to improve the experience around the most common tasks a developer does every day. It narrowed this down to two areas that could be improved and is releasing new capabilities around those. The first area is making the Atlas database easier to work with. It is now possible for developers to use the Atlas CLI to manage their development environments locally using the same experience they have in the cloud. Atlas CLI has also been updated to include Atlas Search and Atlas Vector Search, which enables developers to create and manage search indexes within development workflows.  “By giving developers the power of Atlas at their fingertips no matter their preferred development environment, MongoDB continues to

Digma launches continuous feedback platform

Digma has introduced a Continuous Feedback platform for developers. This platform allows developers to continuously assess their code while it’s running to pinpoint issues and prevent the deployment of faulty code, including code generated by generative AI.  The platform detects regressions, anomalies, code quality concerns, and other patterns that need improvement, and it seamlessly integrates into IDEs and developer tools for real-time application. Continuous Feedback is a new and essential category in software development, complementing existing CI/CD platforms, testing, and validation tools, according to Digma. It addresses the challenges posed by the increased use of generative AI, legacy libraries, and the growing complexity of distributed systems.  The Digma platform employs advanced observability technologies like OpenTelemetry and employs ML techniques to analyze runtime code data and provide automatic suggestions for code enhancements. “Over the years we’ve been continua

Jira updates brings software teams, business side together

Atlassian today announced updates to Jira’s capabilities designed to bring software teams and the business side closer together by enabling every team to manage its work, collaborate, and gain visibility into what other teams are doing. Companies using Jira Software include NASA, which can write code on a Monday and deliver it to drive the Mars Rover on Tuesday. And automaker Audi’s research and development team captures thousands of feature requirements during actual road testing. And there are literally hundreds of thousands of organizations trying to achieve business success through software. Megan Cook, head of product for Jira Software, told SD Times:  “It can’t just be a bunch of engineers in a room doing that. There are so many of the teams that actually get it to that reality where it’s having that impact. And they’re marketers, program managers, designers, sales, like all of these non-technical teams throughout a company that are key to making that happen. And yet, they tend

Voice and image capabilities added to ChatGPT

OpenAI is introducing new features for voice and image interactions. These features provide a more intuitive way to communicate with ChatGPT , allowing users to engage in voice conversations and share visual content to enhance the conversation. The addition of voice and image features in ChatGPT offers users more versatile ways to use the tool in their daily lives. According to OpenAI, a few examples of how users can make use of these new features is they can take pictures of landmarks while traveling for live discussions, snap images of their kitchen to plan meals and even get recipe guidance, and help their children with math problems using photos and shared hints.  These features will be gradually rolled out to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks, with voice available on iOS and Android (opt-in required in settings) and image support on all platforms. To begin using the new voice feature in ChatGPT, users can navigate to the mobile app’s Settings section, access Ne

9 Best Free Node.js Hosting 2023 Zainab Sutarwala The Crazy Programmer

Are you looking for the best free Nodejs hosting platforms? You are at the right place. Node.js is a highly popular JavaScript open-source server environment used by many developers across the world. Right from its commencement in 2009, the server has grown in huge popularity and is used by a lot of businesses. The industry and business sectors primarily make use of Node.js. At present, Node.js is a most loved and well-known open-source server environment. Besides this, it provides the most convenient structure, which supports JavaScript as well as resolves various obstacles. Furthermore, it has made JavaScript easily understandable for programmers on the devices. In this article, we will check out the best free Nodejs hosting platforms that will prove very helpful. By the end, you will have a strong understanding of various options available for the free Node.js hosting solutions accessible for your Node JavaScript projects and can make an informed choice on which service suits yo

A guide to automated testing tools

The following is a listing of automated testing tool providers, along with a brief description of their offerings. FEATURED PROVIDERS APPVANCE is the leader in generative AI for Software Quality.  Its premier product AIQ is an AI-native, unified software quality platform that delivers unprecedented levels of productivity to accelerate digital transformation in the enterprise.   Leveraging generative AI and machine learning,  AIQ robots autonomously validate all the possible user flows to achieve complete application coverage. KEYSIGHT is a leader in test automation, where our AI-driven, digital twin-based solutions help innovators push the boundaries of test case design, scheduling, and execution. Whether you’re looking to secure the best experience for application users, analyze high-fidelity models of complex systems, or take proactive control of network security and performance, easy-to-use solutions including Eggplant and our broad array of network, security, traffic emulat

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: SKIE

SKIE is an open-source tool that provides interoperability between Kotlin and Swift. Kotlin is the official language for Android development, while Swift is the language for Apple platforms, including iOS. It generates Swift wrappers around the Objective-C headers that the Kotlin compiler creates. This recreates features that are supported by both languages that sometimes get “lost in the translation from Kotlin to Objective-C to Swift.” These include exhaustive sealed classes, default arguments, and suspend functions and Flows.  This tool will make it much easier to design Kotlin APIs for use in iOS, as well as improve the experience of calling the APIs from Swift.  SKIE was developed by TouchLab, which is a company that focuses on enabling multiplatform support for Kotlin.  “The bottom line: Every KMP project exporting to Swift should consider trying SKIE, and every new project should have it added from the start,” TouchLab wrote in an announcement about SKIE.   Learn more abo

Recent restrictions on data scraping don’t have to derail your generative AI initiatives

Businesses and developers building generative AI models got some bad news this summer. Twitter , Reddit and other social media networks announced that they would either stop providing access to their data, cap the amount of data that could be scraped or start charging for the privilege. Predictably, the news set the internet on fire, even sparking a sitewide revolt from Reddit users who protested the change. Nevertheless, the tech giants carried on and, over the past several months, have started implementing new data policies that severely restrict data mining on their sites. Fear not, developers and data scientists. The sky is not falling. Don’t hand over your corporate credit cards just yet. There are other, more relevant ways for organizations to empower their employees with other sources of data and keep their data-driven initiatives from being derailed. The Big Data Opportunity in Generative AI The billions of human-to-human interactions that take place on these sites have

Amazon announces new developer tools for building with Alexa

Amazon has unveiled the future of Alexa, revealing plans to harness the power of a specialized large language model (LLM) optimized for voice interactions. This development is expected to enhance the user experience with Alexa, making interactions more natural and conversational. The company emphasized the importance of involving developers in this journey to shape and construct innovative ambient experiences for their shared customer base. To facilitate this collaboration, Amazon introduced new tools that leverage advances in generative AI technology, streamlining the process of building Alexa skills.  These tools will empower developers to create a wide range of experiences, such as accessing real-time data, enjoying immersive generative AI-enhanced games, making restaurant reservations, receiving concise summaries of trending news stories, and more. Developers will have the flexibility to integrate content and APIs with Alexa’s LLM to craft conversational experiences for Alexa-en

GitHub expands Copilot Chat beta to Copilot for Individuals users

GitHub is expanding the beta of its Copilot Chat to all GitHub Copilot for Individuals users. Previously, only GitHub Copilot for Business users could access the beta of this new feature. This means that GitHub users can now take advantage of the beta on their personal GitHub accounts if they are paying for the Copilot for Individuals plan . There is no additional cost on the plan to enable the Copilot Chat beta.  GitHub Copilot Chat allows developers to ask questions, troubleshoot bugs, and learn new languages or frameworks while staying within the IDE. Currently the feature is supported in the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code IDEs.  “Integrated together, GitHub Copilot Chat and the GitHub Copilot pair programmer form a powerful AI-assistant capable of helping every developer build at the speed of their minds in the natural language of their choice. We believe this cohesion will form the new centerpiece of the software development experience, fundamentally reducing boilerpla

Oracle CloudWorld: Semantic search in Oracle Database, OCI Generative AI service, and more

Developers will have a lot of new features to experiment with following a series of announcements from Oracle at Oracle CloudWorld . Some key highlights from the event include:  Semantic search in Oracle Database The company introduced AI Vector Search, which is a collection of semantic search features that include a vector data type, and vector search SQL operators.  These capabilities allow for semantic content in documents, images, and other unstructured data to be stored as vectors and then be used in running similarity queries. The new AI Vector Search capabilities also enable Retrieval Augmented Generation, which is a variation of generative AI that combines large language models with business data.   Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service This new service is now offered in limited availability, and was developed in collaboration with Cohere . It enables companies to integrate LLMs into their own applications. The new service also works seamlessly wit

Next.js 13.5 delivers 22% faster startup and optimized package imports

Vercel has announced the release of Next.js 13.5, which offers several improvements: 22% faster local server startup, 40% lessmemory usage, and optimized package imports.  The performance optimization have been driven by focusing on caching or minimizing slow operations, optimizing expensive file system operations, better incremental tree traversal during compilation, moving unnecessary blocking synchronous calls to be lazy, and automatically configuring large icon libraries.  The maintainers have optimized package imports with a new option called “optimize that does the optimizing automatically, replacing the previous way of doing that manually. A number of libraries have already been optimized to only load the modules that your code uses.  The team also made improvements in “next/image” by adding a new experimental function called “unstable_getImgProps().” This will enable advanced use cases like working with “background-image” or “image-set,” working with the canvas “context.draw

Red Hat Collaborates with Intel to Deliver Open Source Industrial Automation to the Manufacturing Shop Floor

RALEIGH, N.C. – September 19, 2023 – Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a new industrial edge platform, designed in collaboration with Intel, that will provide a modern approach to building and operating industrial controls. By transforming the way manufacturers operate, scale and innovate with standard IT technologies delivered to the plant floor and real-time data insights, the platform will enable industrial control system (ICS) vendors, system integrators (SIs) and manufacturers to automate previously manual industrial automation tasks including: system development, deployment and management, cybersecurity risk reduction, prescriptive and predictive maintenance improvements for factory agility, co-locating deterministic and non-deterministic workloads and reducing turnaround time. Smart factories, or software-defined factories, are playing a crucial role in amplifying the speed at which manufacturers can innovate. According to a