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Defining Cybersecurity – What You Need to Know to Stay Safe Online Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

If you’re like most people, you probably think of “hacking” when you hear the word “cybersecurity.” And while hacking is certainly a form of cybersecurity, it’s just one aspect of this complex field. In this article, we’ll discuss what cybersecurity is and why it’s important for organizations to employ it. We’ll also look at some of the top cybersecurity tools on the market and how they can help your business stay safe online. Defining Cybersecurity The field of information technology security (IT security) or computer security (cybersecurity), often known as ICS, is the practice of ensuring the safety of computer systems and networks by preventing data leakage, hardware theft, damage, service interruption, and fraud. As computing technology, the Internet, and wireless networks are used more frequently, cyber security has grown increasingly important. The explosion of internet-connected devices, such as cell phones and televisions, as well as other IoT gadgets, is the reason. Becau

Node.js 19 is now available

The Node.js team has released Node.js 19, which updates the V8 JavaScript engine to version 10.7 and enables HTTP(s)/1.1 KeepAlive by default. Version 10.7 of the V8 JavaScript engine adds to the JavaScript API the latest version of Intl.NumberFormat , which lets developers create a formatter instance that is reusable and that supports locale-aware number formatting.  By having HTTP(s)/1.1 KeepAlive enabled by default, any outgoing connection will automatically use it and it will provide better throughput. This is because connections are reused.  Other new features include: Support for running the runtime in “watch” mode, which restarts the process if an imported file is changed WebCrypto API is now stable Removal of support for DTrace, SystemTap, and ETW Removal of the –experimental-specifier-resolution flag  According to the team, Node.js 19 will become the “Current” release line after Node.js 18 enters Long-Term Support at the end of the month, and it will remain that way

Styra introduces new way to manage policies

Styra , the cloud-native authorization company and the creators and maintainers of Open Policy Agency (OPA) , today announced a new set of policy bundle management capabilities to Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS). According to the company, these bundle management features are critical for meeting software supply chain security requirements and benefit customers working to optimize growing IT resource consumption and costs. Styra DAS can now generate separate policy and data and bundles so each software pipeline environment has its own policy-impacting data while ensuring that the policy code isn’t altered  as it shifts from one pipeline stage to the next. “Building policy bundles from scratch is often a time consuming and costly venture for any organization, but they’re more critical than ever before in ensuring security and compliance,” says Chris Hendrix, director of product management at Styra. “With Styra DAS policy bundle management, we’re helping organizations op

Tricentis announces portfolio updates

The continuous testing company Tricentis today announced the release of version 9.0 of Tricentis NeoLoad as well as new products Tricentis Test Management for Jira and Tricentis Test Automation for Salesforce . These solutions work to further expand the company’s capabilities in continuous performance testing, test management, and test automation in order to bring organizations improved application quality and delivery time. “As IT investments and spending priorities are scrutinized even more during this challenging economic environment, software testing remains a business-critical activity for companies seeking to streamline and accelerate their business processes and deliver high quality digital experiences to better engage with their customers,” said Kevin Thompson, chairman and CEO of Tricentis. “We are committed to delivering continuous testing innovation that addresses the needs of our customers and are pleased to announce the launch of our new products—Tricentis Test Ma

Instilling QA in AI Model Development

In the 1990’s, when software started to become ubiquitous in the business world, quality was still a big issue. It was common for new software and upgrades to be buggy and unreliable, and rollouts were difficult. Software testing was mostly a manual process, and the people developing the software typically also tested it. Seeing a need in the market, consultancies started offering outsourced software testing. While it was still primarily manual, it was more thorough. Eventually, automated testing companies emerged, performing high-volume, accurate feature and load testing. Soon after, automated software monitoring tools emerged, to help ensure software quality in production. Eventually, automated testing and monitoring became the standard, and software quality soared, which of course helped accelerate software adoption.  AI model development is at a similar inflection point. AI and Machine Learning technologies are being adopted at a rapid pace, but quality varies. Often, the data sci

Google updates guidelines for creating and managing Play Store app listings

Google is launching new features to make it easier for app developers to better display their app in the Play Store.  “The assets and information you provide – descriptions, images, and videos – are essential to users looking to make a decision on what to download,” Allison Chang, product manager for Google Play; Weifang Sun, product manager for Chrome OS; Manuel Wang, product manager for Google Play Console; and Marcus Leal, product manager for Google Play, wrote in a blog post .  Starting next year, Google will give apps that follow its content quality guidelines for larger screens access to richer formats, which will allow them to change the way an app is displayed in the Play Store. The team is also adding support for Chromebook-specific screenshots in the Play Store. Currently, when a Chromebook user browses the store, they will be shown screenshots from phones or tablets, which may be different from how the app looks on a Chromebook. Up to eight screenshots will be able to be

Microsoft adds new component to its Dual-screen layout library

Microsoft has added a new component to its Dual-screen layout library for supporting Navigation Rail on foldable devices, such as the Surface Duo. Navigation Rail is a Material Design component that provides a side navigation bar for app destinations.  On devices with foldable screens, a challenge arises in making sure that UI elements aren’t obscured by the hinge where the device folds, which might occur if the elements aren’t designed for foldable devices and thus are placed in the area the screen folds.  To make sure that the Navigation Rail menu doesn’t conflict with the screen hinge, Microsoft has introduced support for NavigationRailView .  Developers can use the setMenuGravity() function to Top, Center, or Bottom, which will reposition the buttons on the menu to avoid being placed under the screen hinge.  NavigationRailView also supports animations and fling gestures. Because the position of the Navigation Rail is changed at runtime using these methods, a translation anim

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Cloud Seed

Cloud Seed is a new open source project developed jointly by GitLab and Google Cloud. It allows developers to provision Google Cloud services right from within GitLab’s UI.  “We believe that it should be trivial to deploy web applications (and other workloads) from GitLab to major cloud providers. To support this effort, Cloud Seed makes it simple and intuitive to consume appropriate Google Cloud services within GitLab,” GitLab wrote on the project’s documentation page .  While it is initially available for Google Cloud, GitLab hopes to work with every major cloud provider to extend it to those platforms as well. GitLab users can use the interface to set up automated deployments to Google Cloud Run, and all Git commits, branches, and tags will be deployed to the proper Cloud Run environment.  It can also be used to provision Google Cloud SQL databases, with support for all major versions of PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Service.  To learn more, visit the Cloud Seed website .  The

PostgreSQL releases PostgreSQL 15

The team behind the open-source database PostgreSQL today announced the release of PostgreSQL 15 . According to the project maintainers, this release builds on the performance improvements of recent releases with gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments, including improved sorting. PostgreSQL 15 is intended to improve the overall developer experience with the addition of the MERGE command for writing conditional SQL statements that can include INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE actions within one statement as well as several capabilities for observing the state of the database. “The PostgreSQL developer community continues to build features that simplify running high performance data workloads while improving the developer experience,” said Jonathan Katz, a PostgreSQL core team member. “PostgreSQL 15 highlights how, through open software development, we can deliver to our users a database that is great for application development and safe for their critical da

Microsoft Ignite ‘22 Microsoft focuses on employee engagement, developer innovation, among others

Microsoft Ignite ‘22 kicked off today, both virtually and in-person in Seattle, WA. To start the event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stage to provide a keynote address.  He laid out the five core imperatives that Microsoft is focused on, and then provided updates for each of them. They are as follows:  Enable companies to be data-driven Deliver efficiency with automation and AI Enable innovation with a cloud developer platform Re-energize your workforce with Microsoft 365 Protect everyone, everything, everywhere Enable companies to be data-driven According to Nadella, allowing companies to be data-driven starts at the infrastructure level, and moving to the cloud is the best way to scale IT investments with demand. Azure Arc is receiving new updates to provide a more cloud-like experience, including single sign-on that integrates with Azure AD, improved security and monitoring, and new deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Arc.  In order to help c

Asana announces new capabilities for tracking progress against strategic initiatives

The team at Asana , the network management platform, today announced a new suite of features and product integrations that offer enterprises a holistic view of progress against strategic initiatives in order to inform resource allocations and planning quickly.  The offerings are intended to assist organizations in shifting priorities as business needs change with new goals reporting, decrease repeated cross-functional work and wasted costs with an integrated tech stack, and scale global security with enterprise security features. “Enterprise organizations face enormous uncertainty as they steer volatile market conditions. We’re hearing from our customers that they need better ways to align teams as priorities shift in order to accelerate growth,” said Saket Srivastava, chief information officer at Asana. “With Enterprise-Grade Goals that tie team priorities to business outcomes, workflow and integration updates that help cross-functional teams reduce redundancies and errors, and adv

Google announces support for passkeys on Android and Chrome

Google has announced that it will be supporting passkeys on Android and Chrome. Passkeys are an authentication method that offers an alternative to passwords, and the technology was announced by Apple over the summer at its WWDC conference. For users, using a passkey is similar to confirming the use of a saved password by scanning one’s fingerprint or using facial recognition.  “We have worked with others in the industry, including Apple and Microsoft, and members within the FIDO Alliance and the W3C to drive secure authentication standards for years. We have shipped support for W3C Webauthn and FIDO standards since their inception. Today is another important milestone, but our work is not done. Google remains committed to a world where users can choose where their passwords, and now passkeys, are stored,” Diego Zavala, product manager for Android; Christiaan Brand, product manager for Account Security at Google; Ali Naddaf, software engineer of Identity Ecosystems at Google; and

Bitrise to acquire Bazel-based company Flare.Build

Mobile DevOps company Bitrise has announced that it is acquiring Flare.Build , which is a company built around the Bazel build system. Bitrise will be integrating Flare.Build’s product suite into its Mobile DevOps ecosystem. According to Bitrise, this acquisition is part of the company’s larger goal to provide capabilities for managing and automating mobile operations from a single platform.  Bazel has seen adoption from top companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Lyft, Uber, Slack, Tinder, and Reddit, but it can be time and resource intensive to adopt, according to Bitrise. This makes it intimidating for smaller companies with fewer resources to devote to the migration.  By integrating Flare.Build into its portfolio, Bitrise will be able to offer customers a way to experience the benefits of Bazel quickly and effectively, while improving developer experience, increasing productivity, and increasing ROI.  “Flare.Build’s technology, alongside our existing solutions, puts us one step

Checkly Announces Business Milestones, SOC 2 Compliance, New Playwright Test Runner, GitHub Sync, Enhanced Alert Notifications, and More

Today Checkly Inc., the only company with a synthetic app and API monitoring platform made for developers that bridges the gap between Dev, Ops, and QA, announced that over 600 customers and thousands of developers have adopted its platform to seamlessly integrate with their existing development workflows. The company has surpassed 3.5 Billion checks run by users implementing Checkly’s end-to-end monitoring at speed and scale. The company also announced that it is updating the Checkly platform with a host of new product features, including a new Playwright test runner integration, mobile alerting improvements, and general availability of its new GitHub Sync feature to update and control Browser check code. Demonstrating its ongoing commitment to customer privacy, security, needs for data availability, and responding to growing requests from enterprise customers, the company is also now fully compliant with SOC (System and Organization Controls) 2 Type 1. SOC 2 is widely recognized as

GitLab Inc. Launches Cloud Seed in Collaboration with Google Cloud to Bolster Cloud Adoption

Today, at Google Cloud Next , GitLab Inc. , the provider of The One DevOps Platform, announced the launch of Cloud Seed in partnership with Google Cloud. Cloud Seed is a new capability within GitLab that simplifies the developer experience for procuring and consuming cloud services. Cloud Seed allows GitLab and Google Cloud customers to migrate to the cloud using a single platform, consolidating their tech stack without slowing down their cloud adoption process. GitLab’s 2022 DevSecOps Survey found that cloud adoption remains a high priority for organizations, and it is the second highest investment area for DevOps teams. Cloud Seed will enable organizations to undergo a cloud transformation, ultimately allowing them to scale at the speed of the market. Integrating Google Cloud into the GitLab product ensures that organizations can more easily reach cloud adoption targets and access the full power of hyperscalers. “Our 2022 DevSecOps Survey found that DevOps and cloud adoption are t