Today’s topics include Facebook’s strategy to halt fake news, Google’s release of a set of tests to check for known vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries, why developers working with the DevOps application development process are encountering a software testing bottleneck, and Microsoft’s preview of its new SQL server database for Linux.
Facebook has faced severe criticism because the social network because it has become one of the largest distributors of unfounded propaganda and phony news stories along with legitimate news.
To try to solve the problem Facebook will take a multi-faceted approach that uses a form of crowd-sourcing to curate the content as it comes onto news feeds.
The network said it will ask readers for immediate feedback on such articles and will be using a group of editors to respond to this feedback. The company also said it will be making tools available for instant notification of false new stories when they appear.
Google has released a set of tests that developers can use to check some open source cryptographic libraries for known security vulnerabilities.
The company has named the set of tests Project Wycheproof, after a mountain in Australia, which has the distinction of being the world’s smallest registered mountain.
“The main motivation for the project is to have an achievable goal,” Google security engineers Daniel Bleichenbacher and Thai Duong, explained in a blog announcing Project Wycheproof. “The smaller the mountain the easier it is to climb it!”
The engineers wrote that Project Wycheproof is designed to help developers catch subtle mistakes in open source cryptographic libraries that, if left unaddressed, can have catastrophic consequences.
As more enterprises make the move toward utilizing a DevOps approach to software development, many of them are still seeing a problem the process is suppose to eradicate: They’re experiencing a software testing bottleneck called the “QA wall” that puts a damper on the speed of software releases.
The goal of DevOps is to improve the relationship between software developers and business operations by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units.
A Vanson Bourne survey revealed that while 73 percent of respondents have adopted some DevOps processes, 54 percent of those adoptees have identified their current QA automation as a bottleneck.
Microsoft made waves earlier this year when it announced that its SQL Server database was heading to Linux in mid-2017.
For an early peek at what that experience is like, database administrators, can download a beta release of the software. Version 1.1 of the so-called SQL Server vNext Community Technology Preview (CTP), released nearly a month after the first preview, contains several performance enhancements and supports more Linux distributions.
The new vNext branding is meant to evoke SQL Server’s evolution from a Windows-only technology to a cloud-enabled, Linux and container-friendly data platform.
The upcoming release of SQL Server vNext for Linux is one of several moves the software giant is making to court the open source community and developers who make extensive use of Linux to build solutions for the enterprise.