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New Chrome security features seek to better protect user privacy

Google is announcing several new Chrome features aimed at better protecting users as they browse the web.  Safety Check — a tool that checks for compromised passwords, Chrome updates, and other potential security issues in the browser — has been updated to run automatically in the background so that it can be more proactive in protecting users.  It will now inform users whenever it takes actions, such as revoking permissions from sites that haven’t been visited in a while or flagging potentially unwanted notifications.  Safety Check also now automatically revokes notification permissions for a site if Google Safe Browsing determines that site deceived users into granting permission in the first place. In a similar vein, Android users will now be able unsubscribe from site notifications in one click by tapping the “Unsubscribe” button that will now appear in the notifications drawer. This feature is now available on Pixel devices and will be available on more Android devices down th

OpenAI’s o1 reasoning models are a significant step forward in complex reasoning

OpenAI has released the first preview for OpenAI o1, a new series of AI reasoning models that are able to handle more complex tasks than previous models. This is because they spend more time thinking through the problem before responding.  “We trained these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would. Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI wrote in a post .  OpenAI claims that these models perform similar to a PhD student in physics, chemistry, and biology-related tasks. It is also highly capable of solving math and coding problems. For instance, it could be used by healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data, by physicists for generating quantum optics formulas, or by developers to build and execute multi-step workflows.  In testing, the o1 model correctly solved 83% of problems on the International Mathematics Olympiad qualifyin

Docker revamps its subscription plans

D ocker has announced that it is reworking its subscription plans to give all plans access to more capabilities and services, and is also updating the pricing to reflect the additions.  Docker’s plans include Docker Personal, Docker Pro, Docker Team, and Docker Business and they all have been r eworked plans to enable customers to access everything they need under a single subscription with clearly laid out consumption limits and the ability to add more as needed. The changes to the plans will be effective November 15th.   All plans include access to Docker Desktop, Docker Hub, Docker Build Cloud, Docker Scout, and Testcontainers Cloud.  Team and Business plans will include unlimited vulnerability analysis in Docker Scout, and  Docker Build Cloud minutes and Docker Scout analyzed repos are also now included across all the plans. In addition, image pull and storage limits for Docker Hub are switching to consumption based pricing, which Docker says will affect only the highest commer

SmartBear Delivers Full-Stack Observability Insights for Developers with Back-End Performance Monitoring and Distributed Tracing

SmartBear , a leading provider of software quality and visibility solutions, has added OpenTelemetry-native performance insights and distributed tracing as part of its  BugSnag  error and real user monitoring solution. This new functionality empowers developers to proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks and systemic issues with a truly comprehensive view of application performance, increasing responsiveness and enhancing overall customer experience. These new capabilities are valuable for enterprises with highly critical applications and those that prioritize delivering exceptional user experiences, especially on mobile and other front-end platforms where quality of interaction is critical. “The uniqueness of BugSnag’s new distributed tracing lies in its true end-to-end nature, which is increasingly hard to achieve in modern architectures today,” said  Justin Collier , Senior Director of Product Management at SmartBear. “In today’s complex, distributed environments, e

Kong Konnect updates help companies prepare their API infrastructure for AI

Kong is hosting its API Summit 2024 event, and has made announcements about several improvements to its platforms. Key highlights are updates to Kong Konnect, its API management platform, which also include new versions of Kong Insomnia, Kong Gateway, and Kong AI Gateway. The latest updates to Kong Konnect help companies further prepare their API infrastructure to handle AI use cases. “There is no AI without APIs, and the latest version of Kong Konnect delivers the essential infrastructure for both. We aim to give businesses the tools to manage and scale their API traffic securely, helping drive innovation faster than ever before,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Kong Konnect provides a unified API platform for building, running and governing GenAI applications.” This update includes Konnect Service Catalog, which provides a single source of truth for APIs and services, which helps companies manage shadow APIs by allowing them to get rid of undiscovered or

Three considerations to assess your data’s readiness for AI

Organizations are getting caught up in the hype cycle of AI and generative AI, but in so many cases, they don’t have the data foundation needed to execute AI projects. A third of executives think that less than 50% of their organization’s data is consumable, emphasizing the fact that many organizations aren’t prepared for AI.  For this reason, it’s critical to lay the right groundwork before embarking on an AI initiative. As you assess your readiness, here are the primary considerations:  Availability: Where is your data?  Catalog: How will you document and harmonize your data? Quality: Having good quality data is key to the success of your AI initiatives. AI underscores the garbage in, garbage out problem: if you input data into the AI model that’s poor-quality, inaccurate or irrelevant, your output will be, too. These projects are far too involved and expensive, and the stakes are too high, to start off on the wrong data foot. The importance of data for AI Data is AI’s st

JFrog helps developers improve DevSecOps with new solutions and integrations

At its annual user conference, swampUp , the DevOps company JFrog announced new solutions and integrations with companies like GitHub and NVIDIA to enable developers to improve their DevSecOps capabilities and bring LLMs to production quickly and safely.  JFrog Runtime is a new security solution that e nables developers to discover vulnerabilities in runtime environments. It monitors Kubernetes clusters in real time to identify, prioritize, and remediate security incidents based on their risk. It provides developers with a method to track and manage packages, organize repositories by environment types, and activate JFrog Xray policies. Other benefits include centralized incident awareness, comprehensive analytics for workloads and containers, and continuous monitoring of post-deployment threats like malware or privilege escalation. “By empowering DevOps, Data Scientists, and Platform engineers with an integrated solution that spans from secure model scanning and curation on the le

Amplitude Unveils New Experience to Make Digital Analytics Easy for Everyone

Amplitude, Inc.  (Nasdaq: AMPL), a leading digital analytics platform, today released a radically simplified platform experience. It’s now easier for more people and more organizations to get started and turn customer insights into better products. Digital analytics has been too hard for too long. It has been hard to get started because companies need a team of engineers to set up the data pipeline and instrument events. It has been hard to use because teams need to know what to query, how to set up cohorts, and what to measure. And it has been hard to get to value because most people don’t know how to analyze the data or translate it into actions. Amplitude is changing that. With a host of new capabilities and a revamped user experience,  Amplitude Made Easy  removes the heavy lifting so teams can get started, get insights, and get value faster. Now, customers can set up the Amplitude platform with one line of code and immediately capture user actions in their app or website. Teams

vFunction’s latest capabilities aim to improve microservices governance, reduce technical debt

vFunction has released a number of new capabilities that are designed to help companies deal with the increased complexity that microservices bring. “As enterprises push to innovate quickly, the complexity of microservices architectures often stands in the way,” Moti Rafalin, co-founder and CEO of vFunction, wrote in a blog post . “Without proper oversight, services multiply, dependencies emerge, and technical debt snowballs. This complexity can severely impact application resiliency, scalability, and developer experience.” It is launching a number of new governance capabilities to help prevent microservices sprawl. Companies will be able to set rules that ensure microservices are calling authorized servers, enforce boundaries between services to prevent unwanted dependencies, and maintain the right relationships with databases. “With these rules in place, teams can ensure their architecture evolves in a controlled manner, minimizing risk and avoiding architectural drift—a common

Do we need enterprise software marketplaces?

When multiple buyers and sellers trade goods and services in a marketplace, participants benefit from efficiencies of scale, as their specializations of supply come together to meet customer demand.  In enterprise software marketplaces, each participant vendor contributes specialized expertise, functionality, and scale that are essential to building a complete solution for end users—assuming of course, that no single monolithic vendor would as efficiently meet customer needs. Before software marketplaces, end users would buy software built specifically for their own vertical, such as ‘healthcare clinic management’ or ‘point of sale terminal system’ — or hire a consultant to customize a bespoke solution, since most enterprises didn’t have a deep enough development bench to do it themselves. Development partners are precious Consumer software marketplaces are well known, because they live on our smartphones: Apple App Store and Google Play have the markets cornered for their OS users

Dokku – SD Times Open Source Project of the Week

Dokku is an open source platform as a service (PaaS) powered by Docker that is touted as an open-source and mini version of Heroku. Its GitHub page calls it “the smallest PaaS implementation you’ve ever seen.” It builds applications using either Dockerfile or Buildpacks that automatically detect the codebase’s language, and then runs the applications in isolated containers. Once Dokku is set up, Heroku-compatible apps can be pushed to it using git commands.  “Our personal goal is to make the deployment part easy, so all you have to do is worry about writing code,” the project maintainers wrote in a blog post .  In addition to being based on Docker, it also utilizes technologies like nginx and cron to route web processes and automate tasks. Dokku is built out of plugins, such as “config” for managing environment variables and “checks for checking that an application starts as it should. Users can also create their own plugins and share them online. “Dokku’s simple core is easy to

Anthropic announces Enterprise plan for Claude with expanded context windows, GitHub integration

Anthropic has announced the launch of its Claude Enterprise plan, which enables companies to securely use their internal knowledge with Claude and offers an expanded context window, more usage capacity, and a native GitHub integration.  Claude Enterprise offers a 500K context window. For comparison, Claude Pro’s context window is 200K and the free beta has a varying limit based on demand. According to Anthropic, this expanded context window equates to hundreds of sales transcripts, dozens of 100+ page documents, or a medium-sized codebase. “When you combine expanded context windows with Projects and Artifacts , Claude becomes an end-to-end solution to help your team take any initiative from idea to high-quality work output. For example, marketers can turn market trends into a compelling campaign. Product managers can upload product specifications for Claude to build an interactive prototype. Engineers can connect codebases for help on troubleshooting errors and identifying optimizat

Neo4j Transforms Its Cloud Database Portfolio to Accelerate Graph Adoption & GenAI for the Enterprise

Graph database and analytics leader  Neo4j  today announced a major transformation of its Aura cloud database management system (DBMS) portfolio – making it dramatically easier for enterprises to try, build, and accelerate graph in production for any workload or use case. The announcement comes amid rising growth and demand for Neo4j’s cloud offering, driven by the critical role of graph databases in GenAI and advanced analytics applications and accelerated by  GraphRAG . “By 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations — up from 10% in 2021 — facilitating rapid decision-making across the enterprise,” predicts Gartner®.   Gartner on GraphRAG technology also notes in its Hype Cycle report, “RAG techniques in an enterprise context suffer from problems related to the veracity and completeness of responses caused by limitations in the accuracy of retrieval, contextual understanding, and response coherence. KGs (Knowledge Graphs), a well-established techno

Data privacy and security in AI-driven testing

As AI-driven testing (ADT) becomes increasingly integral to software development, the importance of data privacy and security cannot be overstated. While AI brings numerous benefits, it also introduces new risks, particularly concerning intellectual property (IP) leakage, data permanence in AI models, and the need to protect the underlying structure of code.  The Shift in Perception: A Story from Typemock In the early days of AI-driven unit testing, Typemock encountered significant skepticism. When we first introduced the idea that our tools could automate unit tests using AI, many people didn’t believe us. The concept seemed too futuristic, too advanced to be real. Back then, the focus was primarily on whether AI could truly understand and generate meaningful tests. The idea that AI could autonomously create and execute unit tests was met with doubt and curiosity. But as AI technology advanced and Typemock continued to innovate, the conversation started to change. Fast forward to

Android 15 is now officially available

After many months of developer previews and beta releases, Android 15 is now officially available. It will start rolling out to supported Pixel devices in the next few weeks, and in the next few months, devices from Samsung, Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nothing, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, vivo and Xiaomi will get it.  It offers several updates that users will be able to take advantage of, such as the fact that the TalkBack screen reader is now powered by Gemini, Chrome can now read web pages aloud, and the Earthquake Alerts System — which uses crowdsourced earthquake detection technology to notify of earthquakes before they start — is rolling out to all U.S. states and six territories. As with every Android update, there are many changes developers will need to be aware of. This time, the main updates for developers can be divided into four categories: typography and internationalization, camera and media experiences, user experience, and privacy and security. “An