Google Releases Open Source ‘GIF for CLI’ Terminal Tool on GitHub

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June 15, 2018

It’s GIF’s 31st anniversary — exciting, right? Those animated images have truly changed the world. All kidding aside, it is pretty amazing that the file format came to be way back in 1987!

To celebrate tomorrow’s milestone, Google releases a new open source tool today. Called “GIF for CLI,” it can convert a Graphics Interchange Format image into ASCII art for terminal. You can see such an example in the image above.

“Just in time for the 31st anniversary of the GIF, GIF for CLI is available today on GitHub. GIF for CLI takes in a GIF, short video, or a query to the Tenor GIF API and converts it to animated ASCII art. This means each time you log on to your programming workstation, your GIF is there to greet you in ASCII form. Animation and color support are performed using ANSI escape sequences,” says Sean Hayes, Tenor.

Five Supercomputers That Aren’t Supercomputers

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Data Center Knowledge

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June 15, 2018

A supercomputer, of course, isn’t really a “computer.” It’s not one giant processor sitting atop an even larger motherboard. Instead, it’s a network of thousands of computers tied together to form a single whole, dedicated to a singular set of tasks. They tend to be really fast, but according to the folks at the International Supercomputing Conference, speed is not a prerequisite for being a supercomputer.

But speed does help them process tons of data quickly to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. Summit, for example, is already booked for things such as cancer research; energy research, to model a fusion reactor and its magnetically confined plasma tohasten commercial development of fusion energy; and medical research using AI, centering around identifying patterns in the function and evolution of human proteins and cellular systems to increase understanding of Alzheimer’s, heart disease, or addiction, and to inform the drug discovery process.

Router Vulnerability and the VPNFilter Botnet

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Washington Post

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June 15, 2018

On May 25, the FBI asked us all to reboot our routers. The story behind this request is one of sophisticated malware and unsophisticated home-network security, and it’s a harbinger of the sorts of pervasive threats — from nation-states, criminals and hackers — that we should expect in coming years.

VPNFilter is a sophisticated piece of malware that infects mostly older home and small-office routers made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, QNAP and TP-Link. (For a list of specific models, click here.) It’s an impressive piece of work. It can eavesdrop on traffic passing through the router — specifically, log-in credentials and SCADA traffic, which is a networking protocol that controls power plants, chemical plants and industrial systems — attack other targets on the Internet and destructively “kill” its infected device. It is one of a very few pieces of malware that can survive a reboot, even though that’s what the FBI has requested. It has a number of other capabilities, and it can be remotely updated to provide still others. More than 500,000 routers in at least 54 countries have been infected since 2016.

Intel Chip Flaw: Math Unit May Spill Crypto Secrets to Apps – Modern Linux, Windows, BSDs Immune

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The Register

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June 15, 2018

A security flaw within Intel Core and Xeon processors can be potentially exploited to swipe sensitive data from the chips’ math processing units. Malware or malicious logged-in users can attempt to leverage this design blunder to steal the inputs and results of computations performed in private by other software.

These numbers, held in FPU registers, could potentially be used to discern parts of cryptographic keys being used to secure data in the system. For example, Intel’s AES encryption and decryption instructions use FPU registers to hold keys.

In short, the security hole could be used to extract or guess at secret encryption keys within other programs, in certain circumstances, according to people familiar with the engineering mishap.

Modern versions of Linux – from kernel version 4.9, released in 2016, and later – and modern Windows, including Server 2016, as well as the latest spins of OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD are not affected by this flaw (CVE-2018-3665).

Going Global with Kubernetes

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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June 14, 2018

Kubernetes is often touted as the Linux of the cloud world, and that comparison is fair when you consider its widespread adoption. But, with great power comes great responsibility and, as the home of Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) shoulders many responsibilities, including learning from the mistakes of other open source projects while not losing sight of the main goal. The rapid global growth of CNCF also means increased responsibility in terms of cultural diversity and creating a welcoming environment.

Rise of Kubernetes in China

CNCF in general has more than 216 members, making it the second largest project under the umbrella of The Linux Foundation. The project is enjoying massive adoption and growth in new markets, especially in China. For example, JD.com, one of the largest e-commerce companies in China, has moved to Kubernetes.

“If you are looking to innovate as a company, you are not going to always buy off-the-shelf technologies, you take Open Source technologies and customize them to your needs. China has over a billion people and they have to meet the needs of these people; they need to scale. Open Source technologies like Kubernetes enable them to customize and scale technologies to their needs,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF.

This growth in Asia has inspired CNCF to bring KubeCon and CloudNativeCon to China. The organization will be organizing their first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Shanghai, November 14-15, 2018. China is already using open source cloud-native technologies, and through these and other efforts, CNCF wants to build a bridge to help Chinese developers increase their contribution to various projects. CNCF is also gearing up to help the community by offering translations of documentations, exams, certifications, etc.

In interviews and at events in China, language often becomes a barrier to collaboration and the free exchange of ideas and information. CNCF is aware of this. And, according to Aniszczyk, is working on plans for live translation at events to allow presenters to speak in their native language.

CNCF projects are growing not only in new regions but also in scope; people are finding new use-cases every day. While they are enjoying this adoption, the community has also started to prepare themselves for what lies ahead. They certainly can’t predict how some smart organization will use their technology in an area they never envisioned; but they can prepare the community to embrace new requirements.

We have started to hear about CNCF 2020 vision that goes beyond Kubernetes proper and looks at areas such as security and policy. The community has started adding new projects that deal with some of these topics, including Spiffy, which helps users deal with service identity and security at scale for Kubernetes related services, and OPA, a policy management project.

“We are witnessing a wide expansion of areas that CNCF is investing in to bring cloud native technologies to users,” said Aniszczyk.

Bane or boon?

Adoption is great, but we have seen how many open source projects lose track of their core mission and became bloated in order to cater to every use-case. The CNCF is not immune to such problems, but the community — at both developer and organizational level — is acutely aware of the risk and is working to protect itself.

“We have taken several approaches. First and foremost, unlike many other open source projects, CNCF doesn’t force integration. We don’t have one major release that bundles everything. We don’t have any gatekeeping processes that other foundations have,” said Aniszczyk.

What CNCF does do is allow its members and end users to come up with integration themselves to build products that solves the problems of their users. If such integration is useful, then they contribute it back to CNCF. “We have a set of loosely coupled projects that are integrated by users; we don’t force any such integration,” said Aniszczyk.

According to Aniszczyk, CNCF acts almost like a release valve and experimentation center for new things. It creates an environment to test new projects. “They are like sandbox projects doing some interesting innovation, solving some serious problems. We will see if they work or not. If they do work then the community may decide to integrate them, but none of it is forced,” said Aniszczyk.

It’s magic

All of this makes CNCF a unique project in the open source ecosystem. Kubernetes has now been widely adopted across industries. Look at cloud providers, for example, and you see that Kubernetes has the blessing of the public cloud trinity, which includes AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Three top Linux vendors — SUSE, Red Hat, and Canonical — have put their weight behind Kubernetes, as well as many other companies and organizations.

“I‘m so proud of being a person that’s been involved in open source and seeing all these companies working together under one neutral umbrella,” Aniszczyk said.

Join us at Open Source Summit in Vancouver, August for 250+ sessions covering the latest technologies and best practices in Kubernetes, cloud, open source, and more.

The Schedule for Open Source Summit North America Is Now Live

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The Linux Foundation

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June 14, 2018

Join us August 29-31, in Vancouver, BC, for 250+ sessions covering a wide array of topics including Linux Systems, Cloud Native Applications, Blockchain, AI, Networking, Cloud Infrastructure, Open Source Leadership, Program Office Management and more. Arrive early for new bonus content on August 28 including co-located events, tutorials, labs, workshops, and lightning talks.

VIEW THE FULL SCHEDULE »

Register to save $300 through June 17.

REGISTER NOW »

Why Open Source Needs Marketing (Even Though Developers Hate It)

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Forbes

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June 14, 2018

Open source is community and collaboration driven. Instead of one dedicated product development team, there are thousands of developers from all over the world who contribute and develop the open-source project. For traditional marketers entering the open-source space, it takes a bit of a mindset shift. And if you are a company that is participating in an open-source project, you also have a role to play in helping to market it.

So, what have I learned about how to market open-source projects?

1. Recognize and respect the importance of the community.

As a marketer, you work for the community. They are the stars. It is your job to make them shine from behind the scenes. Without the community, the open-source project will die.

Docker Enterprise Edition Offers Multicloud App Management

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The New Stack

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June 14, 2018

Docker has expanded its commercial container platform software, Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) to manage containerized applications across multiple cloud services.

The idea with this release is to better help enterprise customers manage their applications across the entire development and deployment lifecycle, said Jenny Fong, Docker director of product marketing. “While containers help make applications more portable, the management of the containers is not the same,” Fong said.

Docker EE provides a management layer for containers, addressing needs around security and governance, and the company is now extending this management into the cloud.

Pushing AI Performance Benchmarks to the Edge

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Silicon Angle

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June 14, 2018

As I discussed recently, the AI industry is developing benchmarking suites that will help practitioners determine the target environment in which their machine learning, deep learning or other statistical models might perform best. Increasingly, these frameworks are turning their focus to benchmarking AI workloads that run on edge devices, such as “internet of things” endpoints, smartphones and embedded systems.

There are as yet no widely adopted AI benchmarking suites. Of the ones under development, these are the ones that stand the greatest chance of prevailing down the road:

Transaction Processing Performance Council’s AI Working Group: The TPC includes more than 20 top server and software makers. Late last year, the organization formed a working group to define AI hardware and software benchmarks that are agnostic to the underlying chipsets where the workloads are executed.
MLPerf: Early this month, Google Inc. and Baidu Inc. announced that they are teaming with chipmakers and academic research centers to create the AI benchmark MLPerf.

Corgi, the CLI Workflow Manager: Cute And Useful

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Jaxenter

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June 14, 2018

Cuteness overload! Corgi, the CLI workflow manager is here to make your life easier by providing a list of features for creating and managing reusable snippets.

Corgi is a command-line tool that helps with your repetitive command usages by organizing them into reusable snippet. It was inspired by Pet and aims to advance Pet’s command-level usage to a workflow level.