Nvidia’s GPU-powered platform for developing and running conversational AI that understands and responds to natural language requests has achieved some key milestones and broken some records that have big implications for anyone building on their tech — which includes companies large and small, as much of the code they’ve used to achieve these advancements is open source, written in PyTorch and easy to run. (Source: TechCrunch)
University Research Teams Open-Source Natural Adversarial Image DataSet for Computer-Vision AI
Research teams from three universities recently released a dataset called ImageNet-A, containing natural adversarial images: real-world images that are misclassified by image-recognition AI. When used as a test-set on several state-of-the-art pre-trained models, the models achieve an accuracy rate of less than 3%. (Source: InfoHQ)
Huawei To Help Create Nation’s First Open-Source Foundation
Huawei Technologies Co said it plans to partner with other companies to set up China’s first open-source software foundation, which is expected to begin to operate in a month or two to expand the nation’s software community. The plan for the software foundation came after GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code, prevented in July users in Iran and other nations sanctioned by the United States government from accessing portions of its service. The incident highlights increasing geopolitical interference with global open-source tech communities, which are supposed to be fair and open to all, analysts said. (Source: China.org)
NVIDIA Publishes GPU Hardware Documentation
NVIDIA is releasing freely-available hardware interface documentation to assist in the development of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau). The documentation made public at this point primarily covers Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, and Kepler generations of NVIDIA graphics as more is being worked on — obviously the latest-generation Turing we’d certainly like to see sooner rather than later. When asking about open-source Turing documentation, I hear it’s a work-in-progress. (Source: Phoronix)
Rook v1.0 Adds Support for Ceph Nautilus
Rook, a storage orchestrator for Kubernetes, has released version 1.0 for production-ready workloads that use file, block, and object storage in containers. Highlights of Rook 1.0 include support for storage providers through operators like Ceph Nautilus, EdgeFS, and NFS. For instance, when a pod requests an NFS file system, Rook can provision it without any manual intervention. (Source: InfoQ, Rook)
NSA’s Ghidra To Get New Features
Just five months ago at the RSA conference, the NSA released Ghidra, a piece of open source software for reverse-engineering malware. It was an unusual move for the spy agency, and it’s sticking to its plan for regular updates — including some based on requests from the public. (Source: CyberScoop)
GitHub Actions Moves GitHub Into DevOps
Yes, Git, Linus Torvalds’ distributed source code control system, is essential to modern-day programming, but it’s far more than that. Git is key to essentially all DevOps operations. GitHub recognizes that, and with GitHub Actions, it’s transforming its Git services into a DevOps workflow pipeline. (Source: ZDNet)
MIT Publishes Report On Open Source Publishing Tools And Platforms
The MIT Press has announced the release of a comprehensive report on the current state of all available open-source software for publishing. “Mind the Gap,” funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “shed[s] light on the development and deployment of open source publishing technologies in order to aid institutions’ and individuals’ decision-making and project planning,” according to its introduction. It will be an unparalleled resource for the scholarly publishing community and complements the recently released Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape census. (Source: MIT News)
CNCF Completes Kubernetes Cybersecurity Audit
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) this week announced the results of its recent audit performed as part of its ongoing commitment to continuously improve Kubernetes security. CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk says as part of the effort, the CNCF later this year also plans to kick off a bounty program through which it will provide incentives to researchers who identify bugs and other cybersecurity flaws. (Source: Container Journal)
Huawei Announces HarmonyOS, An Open-Source Operating System
HarmonyOS is “the first microkernel-based distributed OS for all scenarios,” consumer group CEO Richard Yu told attendees at the Huawei Developer Conference. The new platform supports smartphones, smart speakers, computers, smartwatches, wireless earbuds, cars, and tablets. In fact, Yu says the platform supports RAM sizes ranging from kilobytes to gigabytes. (Source: Android Authority)