SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Cassandra integrations from Instaclustr

Open-source managed solutions-as-a-service company Instaclustr wants to address some gaps in a few key integrations for the Apache Cassandra database management solution with the announcement of three new open-source projects. The first piece of the problem was finding a way for Kubernetes to more fully integrate with Cassandra. This is where the company’s newly announced open-source Cassandra operator comes in, it explained. “While running Cassandra on Kubernetes can be relatively simple to begin with, Kubernetes provides only a limited understanding of database functionality: it’s blind to key details of the database being written to, and has incomplete capabilities for storing data in-state,” the company wrote in the release announcement.

What is a software ‘connector’?

Open source news to end the week looks to the somewhat incongruous connection between Menlo Park California and Helsinki — it can only be MariaDB Corporation with that HQ combo. Updates to end 2018 see the new availability of the MariaDB Connector for Node.js, giving developers a method to build Node.js applications on top of MariaDB’s enterprise relational database. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialised databases. Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser.

It’s not what IT use to be: Inside Bloomberg’s open-source IT shop

Things aren’t what they used to be in information technology. Legacy vendors, and even proprietary startups, have swift competition from open-source communities. The pace of innovation, new releases and updates in open-source is changing how IT teams build infrastructure and applications. Bloomberg LP figured this out through a time-and-resource draining exercise readers are likely familiar with: building a data-science platform.

Pimcore closes $3.5M for its open-source data platform to expand in the US

Pimcore, an open-source platform for data and customer experience management which has emerged out of Austria, has closed $3.5 million in a Series A funding led by German Auctus Capital Partners AG. The funding will be used for its U.S. expansion.

How Python made it big at Microsoft [Ed: Mac Asay is a Microsoft tool.]

What is CNAB? Inside Docker and Microsoft's new open source standard [Ed: Docker ousted its founder and now this...]

Amazon's creepy facial recog doorbell, Facebook open sources machine learning code and much more

Facebook open sources PyText NLP framework

Charles River Analytics to Release Open-Source Mixed-Reality Training Interface

Oracle's 'Open' Approach To Cloud-Native Software

Kalray Joins Autoware Foundation as Founding Premium Member

Fuchsia Friday: A first look at the Fuchsia SDK, which you can download here

With the significant news this week that the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia “device” are being added to the Android Open Source Project, now seems like a good time to learn more about the Fuchsia SDK. Today on Fuchsia Friday, we dive into the Fuchsia SDK and see what it has to offer developers who might want to get a head start on Fuchsia.

Python, signal handlers, and exceptions

Create a power bar for pygame project

In this chapter, we are going to create the last piece of game feature which is the player’s power bar, after this, I will do all the touches up to this game project which certainly includes to tidy up the game code before uploading the game to the pygame portal. Alright, let’s get to work. The first file which we will need to edit is the score manager file where we will create a power bar object on the lower right corner of the game scene. What we will do here is to deduct the height of the original power bar whenever an enemy missile hits the player ship.

PGI 18.10 Community Edition Compiler Relased For High-Performance Multi-Core CPUs & GPUs

The PGI 18.10 Community Edition compiler was recently released that is geared for HPC workloads and aims to deliver optimal performance on multi-core processors and GPUs.

JFrog to open freebie central repository for Go fans in the new year

Self-proclaimed "Database of DevOps" JFrog is about to fling open the first central repository for Go modules in the form of GoCenter. Originally developed by Google, the open-source language Go, which celebrated its ninth anniversary last month, has seen impressive growth over the years. It hovers in fifth place in Stack Overflow's 2018 survey of most-loved languages (above the likes of JavaScript) and third in rankings of languages devs most want to learn. Python reigns supreme, of course.

GitHub and Kotlin: What is this Fastest Growing Language? [Ed: Another disturbing example of the corporate media treating a privatised site of Microsoft as though it's the complete set of all programming and Free software, licences etc.]

What’s the fastest growing language on GitHub? The repository is seeing a “clear trend toward more statically typed languages focused on type safety and interoperability” the company said this week, including Kotlin, TypeScript and Rust – and it is the former that is surging fastest.

The world's most popular programming language is JavaScript, but why? [Ed: Microsoft as reference again?]

Much of the work done using JavaScript still seems to be carried out by front-end web developers, despite the language finding new uses in areas such as back-end development in recent years. Now the code repository service GitHub has shed further light on what's fuelling the continued popularity of JavaScript, as part of a round-up of which technologies spawned the most new open-source projects on GitHub in 2018. [...] "In 2018 alone, we saw more new users than in our first six years combined, and we celebrated hosting over 100 million repositories. All of this growth is thanks to the open source community," writes Thomas Elliott, data scientist at GitHub

Maze Generator Keeps Plotter (and Kids) Busy

The generator itself is written in Java, and should work on whatever operating system your box happens to be running thanks to the *nix and Windows wrapper scripts [Jon] provides. To create a basic maze, one simply needs to provide the script with the desired dimensions and the paper size. You can define the type of paper with either standard sizes (such as --paper a4) or in the case of a plotter with explicit dimensions (--paper 36x48in).

Iranian phishers bypass 2fa protections offered by Yahoo Mail and Gmail

Attackers working on behalf of the Iranian government collected detailed information on targets and used that knowledge to write spear-phishing emails that were tailored to the targets’ level of operational security, researchers with security firm Certfa Lab said in a blog post. The emails contained a hidden image that alerted the attackers in real time when targets viewed the messages. When targets entered passwords into a fake Gmail or Yahoo security page, the attackers would almost simultaneously enter the credentials into a real login page. In the event targets’ accounts were protected by 2fa, the attackers redirected targets to a new page that requested a one-time password.

Ships are just giant floating computers, filled with ransomware, BadUSB, and worms

The document recounts incidents in which infected ships were stranded because malware caused their computerized navigation to fail, and there were no paper charts to fall back on; incidents where fleet owners paid off ransomware demands to keep ships at sea safe, and where the entire digital infrastructure of a ship at sea failed due to malware that spread thanks to weak passwords.

Are Chinese spying fears just paranoia?

The arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, and the daughter of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, has highlighted growing fears in the West about China’s ascendancy in advanced technology sectors that will increasingly underpin the global economy. Meng’s arrest (in Vancouver, on a US arrest warrant) is not related to corporate espionage, let alone state espionage. Rather, she is accused of using a Huawei subsidiary called Skycom to evade US sanctions on Iran between 2009 and 2014. US prosecutors allege she publicly misrepresented Skycom as being a separate company from Huawei, and deceived banks about the true relationship between the two companies. But although the Meng case is not about spying, it reflects a growing unease among Western policymakers that has been brewing for years. Should the West trust a Chinese telecoms giant to supply us with critical infrastructure?

Notes on Build Hardening

Modern languages (Java, C#, Go, Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc.) are inherently "safe", meaning they don't have "buffer-overflows" or related problems. However, C/C++ is "unsafe", and is the most popular language for building stuff that interacts with the network. In other cases, while the language itself may be safe, it'll use underlying infrastructure ("libraries") written in C/C++. When we are talking about hardening builds, making them safe or security, we are talking about C/C++. In the last two decades, we've improved both hardware and operating-systems around C/C++ in order to impose safety on it from the outside. We do this with options when the software is built (compiled and linked), and then when the software is run.

Survey Results: Open-Source Repo Managers Should Get Paid

We asked, you answered: Yes, developers should be paid for open-source repositories they maintain. Last week, we asked you whether open-source repository maintainers should be compensated for their time. The catalyst for our survey was an instance where an overworked maintainer for a very popular JavaScript framework decided to bring others in to help them manage the repo. In doing so, one of the managers surreptitiously linked to an outside repo that was pinching cryptocurrency data. All indications are the new manager knew what they were doing. The library’s main manager claims they were simply unprepared to continue managing a burdensome repository for free, so they sought help. Open source, after all, is the exchange of data without being compensated.