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TikTok admits secretly banning the word "gay" and similar terms in Russia, elsewhere – Boing Boing

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TikTok admitted today that it has banned certain phrases from being used by users in regions that include Russia, Bosnia and Jordan, with "gay", "I am gay" and "transgender" named as examples by the BBC. The firm says it will continue to restrict the terms and related hashtags to "comply with local laws" and to prevent their use "to discover pornographic content."

A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think-tank said many LGBT hashtags were "shadow-banned" in Bosnia, Jordan and Russia.A shadow ban limits the discovery of content without indicating that a particular hashtag is on a ban list. TikTok said that while some terms were restricted to comply with local laws, others were limited because they were primarily used to discover pornographic content.

The ban was incompetently implemented, resulting in Tik Tok suffering from the Scunthorpe Problem, which appears to have played a role in exposing the policy.

An important thing to note is that this is only vicariously a form of censorship. It is a content policy, embraced willingly (if covertly) by TikTok so that it can profit in markets it has no obligation to enter in the first place.

The traditional techie argument for such policies is that you can't possibly expect businesses to forgo operations in totalitarian or oppressive regimes, that their need to do so trumps any ethical or human rights concerns, and that complaining about it makes you naive and childish. (Tik Tok is based in such a regime, at least for now.)

But a level of flagrant bigotry, beyond the needs of capital or authoritarian regimes, is something Tik Tok has long specialized in. Last year, it admitted limiting material posted by people who were disabled, disfigured, autistic or simply "ugly". Tik Tok's contempt for minorities and the marginalized is corporate culture, not merely an act of compliance.

"This is increasingly sounding like a Black Mirror episode"Elon Musk, introducing Neuralink. Elon Musk's brain-computer-interface venture today unveiled a prototype that involves a pig with a computer chip implanted inside their brain. The coin-sized device is implanted beneath the creature's skull. "It's like a Fitbit, but in your skull," says Musk, and it's implanted by []

A reported UFO in the Congo turned out to be a Loon Balloon, floated 20km up to provide cellular internet out in the sticks. The operators neglected to tell the relevant authorities what they were doing; two UFO hunters ended up in jail while Loon, a subsidiary of Google holding company Alphabet, smoothed things out. []

Isolation.site does just one thing: it visits URLs that you want to check out but don't trust, and shows you what comes up. It's not just a convenient wrapper around the curl command-line tool, but generates a rendered snapshot of the site to look around. Protect your devices from web-transmitted infections (WTIs). Picked up some []

No, your phone does not qualify as emergency tech. While it's obviously a huge help when you find yourself in a jam, your phone's main utility in the event you're stranded with a dead vehicle or stuck somewhere in the middle of the night is to call somebody for help. Instead, you should always have []

TL;DR: The Complete Google Cloud eBook and Video Course Bundle will get you up to speed on using one of the fastest-growing cloud platforms anywhere. While a lion's share of the talk in the cloud services space is consumed by the big two Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure there's actually a []

For power and strength training, coaches and trainers are increasingly recommending kettlebell work. These portable weights combine strength training, cardiovascular fitness, and improving your flexibility while also strengthening your core. While kettlebells are great for explosive workouts and dynamic strength, balance and agility training, they do have a few downsides, like needing about ten different []

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TikTok admits secretly banning the word "gay" and similar terms in Russia, elsewhere - Boing Boing

Someone out there doesn’t like Twitter accounts critical of China – India Today

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Twitter is the platform where people from all over the world, including leaders and celebrities, voice their opinions freely. But this free speech model did not go well within the governance framework of the Communist Party of China (CCP); the microblogging site was banned in mainland China and its equivalent called Sina Weibo emerged. Here's the catch: users' posts on Weibo are heavily-monitored and censored, removing the very essence of free speech.

For the past few months, as the world is grappling with coronavirus that probably originated in China, it looks like Twitter too may have become victim of a censorship bug that could have the same origin.

There was a lot of controversy when Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert who allegedly has close connections with the CCP, was appointed to the board of Twitter as an Independent Director in May 2020.

Li quit her role as chief scientist of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) from Google in October 2018 following a controversy surrounding Google's Project Maven initiative, which helped the Pentagon identify drone targets from blurry video footage.

Li was also instrumental in the setting up of a new Google AI lab in China that may be involved in the controversial Project Dragonfly, which was meant to be a search engine that would suit China's censorship rules.

Twitter currently uses an AI technique called deep learning to recommend tweets to its users and also uses AI to identify racist content and hate speech, or content from extremist groups.

France-based Chinese dissident and commentator Wang Longmeng speaking to Radio Free Asia said that hiring Li to work at Twitter was like hiring a fox to guard the hencoop. "They seem to have ignored the backstory of Li's previous cooperation with China," he said. "Fei-Fei Li... secretly opposed Google's cooperation with the US Department of Defense from a high moral standpoint ... but turned a blind eye to Project Dragonfly, in which Google was planning to help the Chinese Communist Party vet online speech."

Wang said Li also used a slogan closely associated with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP in a 2017 media interview in China, pledging to help Beijing develop its AI capabilities. Li was quoted in Chinese media as using the CCP slogan "stay true to our founding mission" and said that "China has awakened."

"I hope that democratic countries will reflect on this and start plugging the loopholes," he said. "Fei-Fei Li is very likely to be one of those loopholes."

A week after Li joined Twitter, numerous handles that had criticised this appointment were allegedly suspended without basis or reasons. A Twitter user Caijinglengyan discovered that four of his accounts were simultaneously deleted on May 18. He did not receive an explanation until May 23, when he was told his accounts had been taken down for violating Twitter's rules against posting identical content on duplicate accounts.

The user stated that he believes the real reason for his account cancellations was that on May 17, he tweeted that Twitter's new board member has a "red background."

Caijinglengyan claimed that many other Twitter accounts used by Chinese dissidents were suddenly suspended without notice. After he contacted them, he found that they had also criticised Li or started commenting about her just before their accounts were banned.

Journalist Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a Berlin-based researcher and writer specialising in Chinese affairs, tweeted about her latest research paper for the German Council on Foreign Relations which was on the topic - 'How Democratic security can protect Europe from a Rising China'. Soon after this, she received a communication from Twitter about possible complaints on this post. While Twitter did not find any basis to take actions here, it surely looks like a targeted attack of bots which may have reported this tweet minutes after it was posted.

While speaking to India Today, Didi Kirsten opined that this could be part of a targeted campaign where tweets critical of the CCP and its allies were mass reported. It could be bots or anonymous users who are tasked with carrying this out in an organised manner. How else would one explain the immediacy of Didi's posts getting reported?

As tensions build in Ladakh near the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the death of soldier Subedar Nyima Tenzin hailing from Tibet and part of the Special Frontier Force (SFF) of the Indian Army has changed the dynamics of this conflict. Reporting from the ground, India Today's @AbhishekBhalla7 managed to interview the father of a solider injured in a mine blast. This interview went viral and further irked the Chinese establishment now that the SFF and that its soldiers regularly fought against China as part of the Indian Army was no secret.

Bhalla's Twitter handle went kaput soon after; "unusual activity" cited on the restricted page. It was taken up with the Twitter India team and the account was restored soon after.

Twitter responded to questions of India Today, saying: "We would like to reiterate that the account was never suspended. The reporter was facing a login related issue which was resolved quickly."

The login issue occurred only after the account was restricted and was visible to Twitter followers while visiting Bhalla's account. Bhalla confirms this chronology of events. His account was reset after being restricted. While his account was restricted, he could not access his account and needed a two-factor authentication to reset his access.

In late August, @ChinarCorpsIA - one of the official handles of the Indian Army - was allegedly shadow banned when the handle posted a thread on India's war in 1965 against Pakistan. Multiple tweets part of the thread was hidden or unavailable to the followers of the handle.

Other than journalists, OSINT handles too are facing the brunt while posting tweets that question the policies of CCP and reporting developments on the LAC with respect to the ongoing events involving the Chinese and Indian armies.

Famous handles like @Indopac_info and @CestMoiz have recently expressed their anguish over their own tweets being hidden from their views. These are results of an account allegedly getting shadow banned.

The problem for users is not just suspension of accounts by Twitter, but a more powerful option that the micro-blogging site may have in its repertoire-a shadow ban. Often, journalists and popular handles alike allegedly get shadow banned if their account violates a preset rule structure of Twitter.

Twitter reject the claim that they ever indulge in shadow banning a user.

A shadow ban can be defined as "deliberately making someone's content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."

When a person is shadow banned, their posts on a platform are rendered essentially invisible to everyone but themselves. Their experience using a site may not change - they feel like they are still posting normally - but other people cannot see the material they produce.

A company statement dated July 2018 reads: "We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology."

But critics are not satisfied. Interestingly, as of January 1, 2020 Twitter's Terms of Service state that they: (...) may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service (...)

In fact, there is even a website where one can verify if his/her Twitter handle is shadow banned based on a few parameters.

Popular OSINT handle Indopac_info who is a noted critic of the CCP spoke to India Today on the same.

He says, "Twitter has many reasons to restrict a user's reach with their "shadow ban" algorithms. They make sure that only part of my followers receives my tweets on their feed. Many followers told me that they no longer see my tweets or only see some of them. Sometimes, they receive my tweets with a delay of hours or up to 1-2 days."

"Twitter also deletes most of the retweets and likes that I get. I see my retweet count going down a lot, all the time actually and in big numbers. Followers also tell me that they see their retweets and likes disappear. I see the same with new followers. Twitter deletes the follows and followers told me the same many times."

He feels that such actions on CCP critical accounts are widespread and many others face similar issues, especially when commenting on China and CCP.

Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) is a People's Republic of China-born human rights activist and author, best known for her practice of 'Falun Gong'- the subsequent government suppression of the movement - and the book, Witnessing History: One Chinese Woman's Fight for Freedom and Falun Gong, she wrote about her experience regarding it.

She spoke to India Today on this issue and expressed concerns that she too experiences issues that a lot of others have expressed. Even though she is based in the USA, she feels her voice gets suppressed regularly on Twitter.

She said "I feel very sad that I have to do 'calculations' before posting something. We are supposed to have freedom of speech in the US. But in my case, I had to practice a kind of self-censorship, although many people say that I am very brave, I still am afraid. Tech giants are having too much power. This is a very serious issue that we must tackle now. I hope we find a way to deal with it."

Jennifer was referring to her story on Fei-Fei Li and the fear of the same getting suppressed if she had tweeted about the same. So, she posted updates without triggering "alarms".

It won't be unrealistic to assume an army of fake bots or actual people reporting CCP critical tweets. This could very well be the reason behind the message Berlin-based journalist Didi Kirsten Tatlow received from Twitter. It is a fact that Twitter removed close to 200,000 Chinese Twitter bots and fake accounts that were indulging in posting pro-CCP content during the Covid-19 outbreak and Hong Kong protests. Some of the handles and tweets disappearing could also be owing to mass reporting of the same by such bots and fake accounts.

Solomon Yue, Vice-Chairman and CEO at Republicans Overseas, spoke to India Today expressing his anguish and called for a US-Senate level hearing on the alleged shadow banning of Twitter. Republicans Overseas is a political organisation in the USA that is recognised by the Republican National Committee.

He said, "What I like to see is that Twitter users who have experienced shadow banning of CCP critics by Twitter gather their evidences while my friends in the US Senate to hold a Senate Committee hearing based on their evidences. Twitter is not supposed to regulate free speech when it was exempted from users' legal actions by Congress."

The US Congress exempts social networking sites from lawsuits in order to not regulate or edit free speech.

(The writer is a Singapore-based Open-Source Intelligence analyst)

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Someone out there doesn't like Twitter accounts critical of China - India Today

Reprieve for renters facing eviction in England and Wales – The Guardian

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Renters facing eviction have been offered a reprieve but only if they live in areas under local coronavirus lockdowns.

Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, confirmed that court proceedings for evictions would restart in England and Wales on 21 September after being suspended early in the pandemic.

But he said that if an area was in a local lockdown that included a restriction on gathering in homes, evictions would not be enforced by bailiffs.

Jenrick also announced a truce on enforcement action this Christmas, with no evictions permitted in England and Wales in the run-up to and over the holiday except in the most serious circumstances, such as cases involving antisocial behaviour or domestic abuse.

The measures appeared to confirm fears among homelessness and renter campaign groups that the government would not be persuaded into a more permanent U-turn to protect renters who lost income during the spring and summer lockdown and so were issued eviction notices by their landlords.

District councils have said that up to half a million people could be at risk, while the housing charity Shelter said by the end of June, about 174,000 renters had been warned by their landlords that they were facing eviction. Shelter estimated that a quarter of a million renters were in arrears.

As states across the world ordered citizens to stay home in February, the UN housing rapporteur was unequivocal. Housing has become a frontline defence against coronavirus,said Leilani Farha. She called on states to declare an end to all evictions of anyone, anywhere for any reason until the end of the pandemic.

Four months later, and as parts of the world emerge into the so-called new normal, her successor, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, iswarningof an impending tsunami of evictions. In the US, amajority of states have resumed evictions, leaving as many as 40 million disproportionately people of colour vulnerable to homelessness due to rent arrears.

Bailiffs are back in business across the channel, too, afteran extension to Frances winter eviction banexpired last month. In Paris, the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has protected social renters by extending the eviction ban on public housing to 31 October protecting them until next summer by segueing into next winterstrve hivernale.

Some countries are doing more. In Spain, where the leftwing Podemost party are part of a governing coalition,the government has introduced an eviction banthat will remain in force until six months after the end of the state of emergency. An interest-free micro-loan scheme is open to renters who have lost income due to the pandemic.

Strong protections are also in place in Germany, where renting is widespread andrenters unions are well-established and powerful. In March the federal government banned the eviction of tenants who fall behind in rent between April and the end of September, while giving itself the discretion to extend the measure for another six months. Landlords can still take tenants to court to recover lost rent.

For millions, though, the situation remains bleak and uncertain. Thousands in poorer countries such as Kenya and Brazil were being thrown out of their homes even as the pandemic raged, Rajagopal reported. He warned that when people are deprived of shelter, they become more vulnerable to COVID-19 and this heightens the risk of widespread contagion.

I call upon all States to comply with their human rights obligations and ensure that no one is left in a position of increased vulnerability to Covid-19, he said.

Damien Gayle

Ministers have already changed the law to increase notice periods to six months, meaning renters served notice now can stay in their homes over winter. The only exceptions are cases where tenants have demonstrated antisocial behaviour or committed fraud, and the landlord would like to let their property to another tenant.

We have protected renters during the pandemic by banning evictions for six months the longest eviction ban in the UK, Jenrick said. To further support renters, we have increased notice periods to six months an unprecedented measure to help keep people in their homes over the winter months.

The campaign group Generation Rent had welcomed the one-month extension to the eviction ban, but called for a long-term plan to protect renters homes with emergency legislation to restrict the use of section 21 no-fault evictions, as well as eviction for rent arrears.

Labours shadow housing secretary, Thangam Debbonaire, said the announcement showed that the government was gearing up for a drastic increase in evictions this winter, just as coronavirus cases are rising.

They are threatening public health and putting lives at risk, she said. The ban on evictions cannot end until they have a credible plan to keep their promise that no renter should lose their home because of coronavirus.

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Reprieve for renters facing eviction in England and Wales - The Guardian

Why is Pakistans biggest TikTok star leaving the app? – Global Village space

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One of Pakistans biggest TikTok stars has made the shocking decision to leave the app. Jannat Mirza, who is the biggest TikTok star in the country, and has more than 8 million followers on TikTok, recently revealed that she is quitting the app after a rough period of being shadowbanned by the app.

Known for her Bollywood lip-syncs and slow-mo, transform videos, the star has acquired quite a following in recent months. But lately, she fears that her hard work is getting squandered due to her being shadowbanned.

Shadowbanning is the act of blocking a users content on social media sites, in such a way that the user doesnt know its happening. This means that unless you go to the users profile and look for content, you will find it, otherwise a random user wont see it on their timeline, especially if theyre not following you.

Read more: Fiza Hussains journey from Aalima to notorious Hareem Shah

Mirza realized that her low views and her most recent videos being put under review rather than simply being uploaded most likely means that TikTok itself isnt allowing her to do good numbers, she posted a screenshot on her Instagram stories declaring that she would leave the app soon. It is yet to be seen if she actually does end up leaving the app that launched her into the cultural zeitgeist or if she can work with TikTok to figure out how to fix the problems with the app.

Mirza broke out on the social app thanks to her stunning good looks, and even attracted attention from within the Pakistani industry who sought her out for modeling and music videos.

Among them was Sarmad Qamar, who had the actress star in a music video for his song. Her fame also brought her an opportunity to work in Bollywood alongside Kartik Aryan, which she turned down due to the ill treatment of Muslims in India. Instead, shes set to star in the next Syed Noor film with Saima.

Read more: Pornography: Pakistan issues final warning to TikTok

However, there has been a downside to her success, with fans editing her pics and making lewd content with her face. She has previously been subjected to being hacked as well and has publicly admitted to feeling sad over the lengths people would go to tarnish her image.

Nonetheless, with 8 million followers on TikTok and more than a million followers on Instagram, it is clear that regardless of TikTok, Mirza is here to stay. With her stepping into the acting world, you may just see her transition to other mediums soon.

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Why is Pakistans biggest TikTok star leaving the app? - Global Village space

Meet GitOps, the key to launching effective software releases in the cloud-native era – SiliconANGLE News

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The automation story behind DevOps centers on CI/CD, the continuous integration and continuous deployment that results in working code ready for production.

Deployment isnt the end of the process, however. Releasing code is the missing step putting new software in front of customers and end-users while ensuring it meets the ongoing objectives of the business.

Achieving this customer centricity and rapid deployments of CI/CD is difficult enough with traditional on-premises and cloud environments. But when deploying to Kubernetes-powered cloud-native environments, the massive scale and ephemerality of the operational environment requires an end-to-end rethink of how to release software into production and operate it once its there.

While most enterprises are currently in the midst of ramping up their Kubernetes deployments, certain industries telecommunications in particular are already looking ahead to the need for unprecedented scale.

As part of the 5G buildout, telcos are standing up small data centers at cell towers and points of presence. But small is a misleading adjective, since these data centers are essentially clouds in their own right, running potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of Kubernetes clusters each.

From the perspective of the telco business, product managers want the ability to roll out new services to customers in sophisticated, dynamic ways. They may want to roll out new capabilities to a small group of customers, and then expand the deployment over time. They may have geographically specific offerings. Or perhaps they will delineate different service categories by compliance restrictions.

Furthermore, the telcos represent the tip of the sword. Many industries, from banking to automotive to media, are also looking to leverage similar capabilities to drive market share and customer value.

The list of possible variations in service offerings that such enterprises might want to roll out to different segments of their respective customer bases is extensive. Similarly, the scale that their technical infrastructures, as well as the personnel supporting them, also goes well beyond their earlier requirements from a mere handful of years previous.

On the one hand, this explosive growth in business demand for ephemerality and scale is driving the exceptionally rapid maturation of the Kubernetes ecosystem.

On the other hand, all this cutting-edge technology actually has to work. And thats where cloud-native operations fits in.

Cloud-native computing takes the established infrastructure as code principle and extends it to model-driven, configuration-based infrastructure. Cloud-native also leverages the shift-left, immutable infrastructure principle as well as favoring extensibility over customizability, itself a model-driven practice.

Although a model-driven, configuration-based approach to software deployment is necessary for achieving the goals of cloud-native computing, it is not sufficient to address the challenges of ensuring the scale and ephemerality characteristics of deployed software in the cloud-native context.

Software teams must extend such configurability to production environments in a way that expects and deals with ongoing change in production. To this end, canary deployments, blue/green rollouts, automated rollbacks and other techniques are necessary to both deal with and take advantage of ongoing, often unpredictable change in production environments.

Abstracting across different production environments is also an important challenge. Whether it be different public clouds, different Kubernetes distributions, or hybrid IT challenges that mix cloud and on-premises environments (perhaps for compliance reasons), cloud-native release orchestration must abstract such differences in order to provide a coherent, configuration-based approach to automating deployments across such variations.

Dependency management is also essential. Whether it be dependencies among individual microservices, or perhaps dependencies upon APIs that provide access to other types of software components, its important that unexpected dependencies dont break the deployment, even when individual components are ephemeral.

Finally, software teams must be able to deal with unprecedented scale. Kubernetes itself is built to scale, with an architecture that deploys microservices into containers, containers into pods, and pods into clusters but clusters arent enough.

Enterprises are already working through the intricacies of multicluster Kubernetes deployments. Software teams must also consider groups of clusters and then fleets of groups of clusters. Such fleets would typically cover multiple regions or data centers, bringing additional challenges of massive scale to the cloud-native party.

In a useful oversimplification, the cloud-native community has boiled down everything organizations need to do to get Kubernetes running in full production into three days.

Day 0 is the planning day. Day 1 is when you roll out Kubernetes and the rest of your cloud-native ecosystem. Day 2 represents full operations at scale.

Dividing such a complex, interconnected set of tasks into three discrete days highlights one important fact: Day 2 has so far gotten short shrift.To provide adequate attention to day 2 issues, the community has coined a term: GitOps.

GitOps is a cloud-native model for operations that takes into account all the concepts this article has covered so far, including model-driven, configuration-based deployments onto immutable infrastructure that supports dynamic production environments at scale.

GitOps gets its name from Git, the hugely popular open source source code management tool. Yet, although SCM is primarily focused on the pre-release parts of the software lifecycle, GitOps focuses more on the Ops than the Git.

GitOps extends the Git-oriented best practices of the software development world to ops, aligning with the configuration-based approach necessary for cloud-native operations only now, the team uses Git to manage and deploy the configurations as well as source code.

Such an approach promises to work at scale even at the fleet level, since GitOps is well-qualified to abstract all the various differences among environments, deployments, and configurations necessary to deal with ephemeral software assets at scale.

GitOps also promises a new approach to software governance that resolves issues of bottlenecks. In traditional software development (including Agile), a quality gate or change control board review requirement can stop a software deployment dead in its tracks. Instead, GitOps abstracts the policies that lead to such slowdowns, empowering organizations to better leverage automation to deliver adequate software government at speed.

The beating heart of cloud-native computing is open-source software, so its only logical that open-source projects are spearheading efforts in cloud-native operations.

For instance, Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps-centric CD tool for Kubernetes. Similarly, Tekton is a flexible open source framework for creating CI/CD systems, allowing developers to build, test and deploy across cloud providers and on-premises systems.

In many ways, however, such projects are only pieces of the cloud-native operations puzzle, and it falls to the vendors to put the pieces together.To begin with, a number of vendors tout the model-driven configuration-based approach. Here are a few examples.

Digital.ai Software Inc., for example, takes a model-driven, scalable approach, making changes simple to make and to propagate to all environments. With Digital.ai, developers dont need to maintain complicated scripts or workflows for each deployment instance.

Octopus Deploy Pty Ltd.follows a similar approach, with model-driven ops configuration that provides simple configuration abstractions across heterogeneous environments, for example, on-premises as well as in the cloud.

With Octopus, instead of writing separate scripts for each environment, developers can put those scripts into Octopus and parametrize them, creating an abstracted configuration representation. Instead of separate CI/CD tooling, ops tooling and runbook automation, Octopus provides one deployment tool across all tools, environments and platforms.

Similar to Octopus, ShuttleOps Inc. encapsulates a host of connectors and its own coded application and infrastructure configurations under the covers, parametrizing them as steps in the pipeline workflow. It then reports results to the orchestration and management tools of choice.

CircleCI (Circle Internet Services Inc.) and Cloudbees Inc. are two other vendors that represent a full deployment via declarative configuration files.

Many vendors also resolve the interdependencies among microservices (as well as other components) in production. Cloud66 Inc. enables developers and architects to define service dependencies in an abstracted but deterministic fashion. Those dependencies define the workflows that operations must manage.

Cloud66 can then tell developers when they need a new version of a particular piece of software in order to resolve such dependencies, and it also tells operators what they need to do to support it.

Harness Inc. offers what it calls a continuous delivery abstraction model that uses templates to eliminate dependencies. The CDAM resolves the impact of upstream and downstream microservices dependencies with automatic rollbacks.

Several vendors pull together the cloud-native operations story with a GitOps offering.

At WeaveWorks Inc., GitOps is context-aware, leading to a model of the entire system which represents its desired state. WeaveWorks supports multiple variations, for example, custom platform as a service on-premises as part of the same comprehensive model.WeaveWorks leverages a distributed database for configurations that supports potentially millions of clusters and works in high latency and occasionally disconnected environments.

GitLab Inc. is another vendor with explicit GitOps support. GitLab offers a single platform that takes an infrastructure as code approach, defining configurations and policies as code while leveraging automation to apply changes with Git merge requests.

This automation support in GitLab resolves many governance issues, as it leads to approvals with fewer bottlenecks. GitLabs GitOps strategy is all about automation, for example, automated rollbacks.GitLab also supports release evidence, which gives an audit trail of everything included in each release along with associated metadata.

D2IQ Inc. touts its own flavor of GitOps it calls GitNative, which combines GitOps and Kubernetes-native CI/CD. The goal is to maximize speed, scale, and quality via full-lifecycle Git automation from DevOps to GitOps to GitNative.

D2IQ takes an immutable infrastructure approach that leverages Kubernetes APIs and primitives. Its platform is both serverless and stateless, also works on-premises. D2IQ leverages both the Argo CD and Tekton open source projects.

A final GitOps-centric vendor is Codefresh Inc., whichuses Git as the single source of truth, automating and securing pull requests and deployments. It handles source code provenance and support for multiple regions.

Where the rubber hits the road with Day 2 Kubernetes deployments is whether they will handle massive scale scale on the order of millions of clusters.

Several vendors tout such capabilities. WeaveWorks offers cluster management that runs on the customers choice of managed Kubernetes platform plus application management, including release automation and progressive CD that scales to fleets.

Vamp.io BV leverages Kubernetes-based environments to provide release orchestration for applications that consist of large numbers of ephemeral microservices. This vendor offers release orchestration for DevOps that fully automates releases, including A/B testing, fine-grained segmentation and multitenant releases.

Rancher Labs Inc.,soon to be part of SUSE,offers GitOps at scale. It deals well with large numbers of heterogeneous nodes, including clusters, cluster groups and fleets. D2IQ also touts a single pane of glass for managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters.

A few vendors are also tackling the difficult challenge of ensuring that code in production continues to meet the business need even when that code is inherently dynamic and ephemeral. I call this capability intent-based operations.

On this list: the Keptn open-source project from Dynatrace LLC. Keptn produces a remediation file that automates the remediation of code in production as it drifts from its intended purpose. This remediation also allows for graceful failure in an automated fashion.

Keptn validates whether a particular remediation action works and, if not, it tries another one. Dynatrace calls this automated iterative approach to remediation micro-operations.

Harnesss GitOps approach also includes continuous verification across performance, quality and revenue, with automatic rollbacks another example of intent-based operations.

Finally, Vamp leverages metrics from production traffic to provide continuous validation, ensuring released code meets requirements on a continual basis.

It is tempting for anyone in a traditional enterprise to look at the massive scale and ephemerality characteristics of cloud-native deployments and wonder whether their organizations would ever need software that follows such patterns, which are so dramatically different from most of the software theyre familiar with in todays enterprise environments.

While its true that industry needs will vary, and individual companies will face different challenges from their competitors, no one should be too confident that the Day 2 vision this article lays out wont apply to them.

Remember, if a technical capability becomes available that improves the ability for certain organizations to roll out differentiated products and services that meet customer needs, then their competition must also leverage similar capabilities or risk becoming uncompetitive and, in the end, failing to survive.

In other words, cloud-native computing is here. Its already delivering massive scale and ephemerality to enterprises that are leveraging such capabilities to deliver differentiated products and services to their respective markets. If your organization doesnt jump on this bandwagon as well and quickly your future is in question. Dont be left behind.

Jason Bloomberg is founder and president of Intellyx, which publishes theCloud-Native Computing Posterand advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. Hewrote this article for SiliconANGLE. (* Disclosure:At the time of writing, Digital.ai and Dynatrace are former Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mention in this article is an Intellyx customer.)

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Create ASTC Textures Faster With the New astcenc 2.0 Open Source Compression Tool – POP TIMES UK

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Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is an advanced lossy texture compression format, developed by Arm and AMD and released as royalty-free open standard by the Khronos Group. It supports a wide range of 2D and 3D color formats with a flexible choice of bitrates, enabling content creators to compress almost any texture asset, using a level of compression appropriate to their quality and performance requirements.

ASTC is increasingly becoming the texture compression format of choice for mobile 3D applications using the OpenGL ES and Vulkan APIs. ASTCs high compression ratios are a perfect match for the mobile market that values smaller download sizes and optimized memory usage to improve energy efficiency and battery life.

ASTC 2D Color Formats and Bitrates

The astcenc ASTC compression tool was first developed by Arm while ASTC was progressing through the Khronos standardization process seven years ago. astcenc has become widely used as the de facto reference encoder for ASTC, as it leverages all format features, including the full set of available block sizes and color profiles, to deliver high-quality encoded textures that are possible when effectively using ASTCs flexible capabilities.

Today, Arm is delighted to announce astcenc 2.0! This is a major update which provides multiple significant improvements for middleware and content creators.

The original astcenc software was released under an Arm End User License Agreement. To make it easier for developers to use, adapt, and contribute to astcenc development, including integration of the compressor into application runtimes, Arm relicensed the astcenc 1.X source code on GitHub in January 2020 under the standard Apache 2.0 open source license.

The new astcenc 2.0 source code is now also available on GitHub under Apache 2.0.

astcenc 1.X emphasized high image quality over fast compression speed. Some developers have told Arm they would love to use astcenc for its superior image quality, but compression was too slow to use in their tooling pipelines. The importance of this was reflected in the recent ASTC developer survey organized by Khronos where developer responses rated compression speed above image quality in the list of factors that determine texture format choices.

For version 2.0, Arm reviewed the heuristics and quality refinement passes used by the astcenc compressoroptimizing those that were adding value and removing those that simply didnt justify their added runtime cost. In addition, hand-coded vectorized code was added to the most compute intensive sections of the codec, supporting SSE4.2 and AVX2 SIMD instruction sets.

Overall, these optimizations have resulted in up to 3x faster compression times when using AVX2, while typically losing less than 0.1 dB PSNR in image quality. A very worthwhile tradeoff for most developers.

astcenc 2.0 Significantly Faster ASTC Encoding

The tool now supports a clearer set of compression modes that directly map to ASTC format profiles exposed by the Khronos API support and API extensions.

Textures compressed using the LDR compression modes (linear or sRGB) will be compatible with all hardware implementing OpenGL ES 3.2, the OpenGL ES KHR_texture_compression_astc_ldr extension, or the Vulkan ASTC optional feature.

Textures compressed using the HDR compression mode will require hardware implementing an appropriate API extension, such as KHR_texture_compression_astc_hdr.

In addition, astcenc 2.0 now supports commonly requested input and output file formats:

Finally, the core codec is now separable from the command line front-end logic, enabling the astcenc compressor to be integrated directly into applications as a library.

The core codec library interface API provides a programmatic mechanism to manage codec configuration, texture compression, and texture decompression. This API enables use of the core codec library to process data stored in memory buffers, leaving file management to the application. It supports parallel processing for compression of a single image with multiple threads or compressing multiple images in parallel.

You can download astcenc 2.0 on GitHub today, with full source code and pre-built binaries available for Windows, macOS, and Linux hosts.

For more information about using the tool, please refer to the project documentation:

Arm have also published an ASTC guide, which gives an overview of the format and some of the available tools, including astcenc .

If you have any questions, feedback, or pull requests, please get in touch via the GitHub issue tracker or the Arm Mali developer community forums:

Khronos and Vulkan are registered trademarks, and ANARI, WebGL, glTF, NNEF, OpenVX, SPIR, SPIR-V, SYCL, OpenVG and 3D Commerce are trademarks of The Khronos Group Inc. OpenXR is a trademark owned by The Khronos Group Inc. and is registered as a trademark in China, the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

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Create ASTC Textures Faster With the New astcenc 2.0 Open Source Compression Tool - POP TIMES UK

Microsoft Teams: Now you can use it with GitHub in this new public beta – ZDNet

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Microsoft-owned GitHub has announced the public beta of a new GitHub integration with Microsoft Teams.

The public beta means developers using GitHub now have the option of adding the GitHub app to the Microsoft Teams app, just as they've been able to do with the Slack chat for several years.

GitHub and Slack teamed up in 2018 to bring GitHub to Slack to make it easier for teams to track GitHub activity in Slack channels.

SEE: Top 100+ tips for telecommuters and managers (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

The GitHub and Microsoft Teams integration, which is maintained by GitHub, offers similar functionality as the Slack integration but for Teams channels.

"The GitHub integration for Microsoft Teams gives you and your teams full visibility into your GitHub projects right in your Teams channels, where you generate ideas, triage issues and collaborate with other teams to move projects forward," GitHub explains.

GitHub users can install the GitHub preview app from the Microsoft Teams app store within the Teams app. Users need to link GitHub and Teams accounts by authenticating to GitHub using a @github sign-in command.

GitHub for Teams allows users to track and create new commits, pull requests, issues, status updates, comments and code reviews.

Github users can subscribe and unsubscribe to notifications for an organization or a repository's activity to keep notifications relevant.

GitHub highlights a feature that lets users 'unfurl' GitHub links to give others in a Microsoft Teams channel more information when they share links to GitHub activities, such as pull requests.

The app groups notifications for pull requests and issues under a parent card as replies. The parent card shows the latest of these issues along with information about the title, assignees, reviewers, labels and checks.

SEE: GitHub: Our upgrade to programming language Ruby 2.7 fixes over 11,000 issues

The GitHub and Teams integration should be good news for the portion of GitHub's 30 million developer users who also rely on Teams for collaboration.

Microsoft meanwhile has been busy releasing new features for Microsoft Teams, which as of April had 75 million daily active users. The latest feature it released for Teams was the new Lists app, which offers Teams users a spreadsheet format with a focus on collaboration and completing tasks.

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Microsoft Teams: Now you can use it with GitHub in this new public beta - ZDNet

How to find anyone anywhere with online facial recognition – E&T Magazine

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Is DIY facial recognition the new privacy threat? Plus back to college, and the E&T Innovation Awards go virtual

Facial recognition technology is turning up in ever more applications from the useful, like unlocking smartphones, and the fun, like Facebook tagging, to the essential, like crime detection, or the life-saving, like prevention of terrorism.

Our faces too are photographed, filmed and sometimes clocked almost everywhere we go. We post them ourselves, on social media or elsewhere on the web. How many images of your face does your name yield in Google Images? Mine turns up a few dozen, half of them appearing at the top of this monthly column. Ive hardly aged! Its not as many as the Queen or David Beckham, but then I manage to avoid the paparazzi and rarely post selfies (I made an exception when I met Giorgio Moroder at CES in January).

I dont really want my phizog everywhere online, for no particular reason really except vague, probably irrational worries about security and privacy. I would be more concerned if I lived in a more repressive regime, especially if was looking to changeit.

So how easy is it to search the internet and find anyone anywhere? Policies on facial recognition vary widely around the world; some governments employ it freely themselves while others are more cautious about citizen privacy. Some allow private companies more free rein than others. And the tech giants can themselves also be cautious about the implications of allowing anyone to find any face anywhere on the web. Upload a picture of yourself to Google Images and it will produce people with similar clothing or backgrounds but probably not you.

Yet it may only be a matter of time before the genie is really out of the bottle because it is so very easy. Facial-recognition technology is freely available as open-source code packages. Ben Heubl tried it for E&T.It was scarily or satisfyingly efficient, depending on your viewpoint. We also tried it with a picture of Lord Lucan to see if we could solve that mystery. Most of the matches were taken before his disappearance, but it also flagged up James Coburn in A Fistful of Dynamite as a match. Who would have guessed? Yes, it works but its not perfect.

Also in this issue, we start a new regular feature with TV presenter Dr Shini Somara interviewing some extraordinary engineers about their careers, influences and aspirations. First we hear from Clare Elwell, who develops optical monitoring and imaging systems for medicine at UCL, about what makes her tick.

Next month well be revealing the shortlists for the E&T Innovation Awards. Fingers crossed if youve entered, and if you havent well, do it next year! It will be a virtual event this year, but there are some exciting ideas in the pipeline and we aim to make it bigger and better than the real live event. Stay tuned and, as the autumn approaches, stay safe.

E&T

Image credit: E&T

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How to find anyone anywhere with online facial recognition - E&T Magazine

Three takeaways from a visit to TikToks new transparency center – The Verge

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In July, amid increasing scrutiny from the Trump administration, TikTok announced a novel effort to build trust with regulators: a physical office known as the Transparency and Accountability Center. The center would allow visitors to learn about the companys data storage and content moderation practices, and even to inspect the algorithms that power its core recommendation engine.

We believe all companies should disclose their algorithms, moderation policies, and data flows to regulators, then-TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer said at the time. We will not wait for regulation to come.

Regulation came a few hours later. President Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he planned to ban TikTok from operating in the United States, and a few days later he did. The president set a deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok by September 15th that is, this coming Tuesday and Mayer quit after fewer than 100 days on the job. (The deadline has since been changed to November 12th but also Trump said today that the deadline is also still Tuesday? Help?)

With so much turmoil, you might expect the company to set aside its efforts to show visitors its algorithms, at least temporarily. But the TikTok Transparency and Accountability Center is now open for (virtual) business and on Wednesday I was part of a small group of reporters who got to take a tour over Zoom.

Much of the tour functioned as an introduction to TikTok: what it is, where its located, and who runs it. (Its an American app, located in America, run by Americans, was the message delivered.) We also got an overview of the apps community guidelines, its approach to child safety, and how it keeps data secure. All of it is basically in keeping with how American social platforms manage these concerns, though its worth noting that 2-year-old TikTok built this infrastructure much faster than its predecessors did.

More interesting was the section where Richard Huang, who oversees the algorithm responsible for TikToks addictive For You page, explained to us how it works. For You is the first thing you see when you open TikTok, and it reliably serves up a feed of personalized videos that leaves you saying Ill just look at one more of these for 20 minutes longer than you intended. Huang told us that when a new user opens TikTok, the algorithm fetches eight popular but diverse videos to show them. Sara Fischer at Axios has a nice recap of what happens from there:

The algorithm identifies similar videos to those that have engaged a user based on video information, which could include details like captions, hashtags or sounds. Recommendations also take into account user device and account settings, which include data like language preference, country setting, and device type.

Once TikTok collects enough data about the user, the app is able to map a users preferences in relation to similar users and group them into clusters. Simultaneously, it also groups videos into clusters based on similar themes, like basketball or bunnies.

As you continue to use the app, TikTok shows you videos in clusters that are similar to ones you have already expressed interest in. And the next thing you know, 80 minutes have passed.

Eventually the transparency center will be a physical location that invited guests can visit, likely both in Los Angeles and in Washington, DC. The tour will include some novel hands-on activities, such as using the companys moderation software, called Task Crowdsourcing System, to evaluate dummy posts. Some visitors will also be able to examine the apps source code directly, TikTok says.

I think this is great. Trust in technology companies has been in decline, and allowing more people to examine these systems up close feels like a necessary step toward rebuilding it. If you work at a tech company and ever feel frustrated by the way some people discuss algorithms as if theyre magic spells rather than math equations well, this how you start to demystify them. (Facebook has a similar effort to describe what youll find in the News Feed here; I found it vague and overly probabilistic compared to what TikTok is offering. YouTube has a more general guide to how the service works, with fairly sparse commentary on how recommendations function.)

Three other takeaways from my day with TikTok:

TikTok is worried about filter bubbles. Facebook has long denied that it creates filter bubbles, saying that people find a variety of diverse viewpoints on the service. Thats why I was interested to hear from TikTok executives that they are quite concerned about the issue, and are regularly refining their recommendation algorithm to ensure you see a mix of things. Within a filter bubble, theres an informational barrier that limits opposing viewpoints and the introduction of diverse types of content, Huang said. So, our focus today is to ensure that misinformation and disinformation does not become concentrated in users For You page.

The problems are somewhat different on the two networks Facebook is primarily talking about ideological diversity, where TikTok is more concerned with promoting different types of content but I still found the distinction striking. Do social networks pull us into self-reinforcing echo chambers, or dont they?

TikTok is building an incident command center in Washington, DC. The idea is to be able to identify critical threats in real time and respond quickly, the company said, which feels particularly important during an election year. I dont know how big a deal this is, exactly for the time being, it sounds like it could just be some trust and safety folks working in a shared Slack channel? But the effort does have an undeniably impressive and redundant official name: a monitoring, response and investigative fusion response center. OK!

You cant prove a negative. TikTok felt compelled to design these guided tours amid fears that the app would be used to share data with Chinese authorities or promote Communist Party propaganda to Americans. (Ben Thompson has a great, subscribers-only interview with the New York Times Paul Mozur that touches on these subjects today.) The problem with the tour, though, is that you cant show TikTok not doing something. And I wonder if that wont make the transparency center less successful than the company hoped.

I asked Michael Beckerman, a TikTok vice president and head of US public policy, about that challenge.

Thats why were trying to be even more transparent were meeting and talking to everybody that we can, Beckerman told me. What a lot of people are saying people that are really well read into global threats is that TikTok doesnt rank. So if youre spending too much time worrying about TikTok, what are you missing?

Oh, I can think of some things.

Anyway, TikToks transparency center is great a truly forward-leaning effort from a young company. Assuming TikTok survives beyond November, Id love to visit it in person sometime.

Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech platforms.

Trending up: Google is giving more than $8.5 million to nonprofits and universities using artificial intelligence and data analytics to better understand the coronavirus crisis, and its impact on vulnerable communities. (Google)

Russian government hackers have targeted 200 organizations tied to the 2020 presidential election in recent weeks, according to Microsofts threat intelligence team. China has also launched cyberattacks against high-profile individuals linked to Joe Bidens campaign, while Iranian actors have targeted people associated with President Trumps campaign. Dustin Volz at The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Most of the attempted intrusions havent been successful, and those who were targeted or compromised have been directly notified of the malicious activity, Microsoft said. Russian, Chinese and Iranian officials didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

The breadth of the attacks underscore widespread concerns among U.S. security officials and within Silicon Valley about the threat of foreign interference in the presidential election less than two months away. [...]

The Russian actor tracked by Microsoft is affiliated with a military intelligence unit and is the same group that hacked and leaked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential contest. In addition to political consultants and state and national parties, its recent targets have included advocacy organizations and think tanks, such as the German Marshall Fund, as well as political parties in the U.K., Microsoft said.

Whats the worst thing that could happen the night of the US presidential election? Experts have a few ideas. Misinformation campaigns about voter fraud, disputed results, and Russian interference are all possible scenarios. (The New York Times)

Voting machines have a bad reputation, but most of their problems are actually pretty minor and unlikely to impair a fair election. Theyre often the result of ancient technology not hacking. (Adrianne Jeffries / The Markup)

Google said it will remove autocomplete predictions that seem to endorse or oppose a candidate or a political party, or that make claims about voting. The move is an attempt to improve the quality of information available on Google before the election. (Anthony Ha / TechCrunch)

Trump is considering nominating a senior adviser at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration who helped draft the administrations social media executive order to the Federal Communications Commission. Nathan Simington is known for supporting Republicans bias against conservatives schtick, and helped to craft a recent executive order about social media. (Makena Kelly / The Verge)

A network of Facebook pages is spreading misinformation about the 2020 presidential election, funneling traffic through an obscure right-wing website, then amplifying it with increasingly false headlines. The artificial coordination might break Facebooks rules. (Popular Information)

Facebook is re-evaluating its approach to climate misinformation. The company is working on a climate information center, which will display information from scientific sources, although nothing has been officially announced. It will look beautiful sandwiched in between the COVID-19 information center and the voter information center. (Sarah Frier / Bloomberg)

Facebook reviews user data requests through its law enforcement portal manually, without screening the email address of people who request access. The company prefers to let anyone submit a request and then check that its real, rather than block them with an automated system. (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / Vice)

QAnon is attracting female supporters because the community isnt as insular as other far-right groups, this piece argues. That might be a bigger factor in its ability to convert women than the save the children content. (Annie Kelly / The New York Times)

Chinas embassy in the UK is demanding Twitter open an investigation after its ambassadors official account liked a pornographic clip on the platform earlier this week. The embassy said the tweets were liked by a possible hacker who had gained access to the ambassadors account. Thats what they all say! (Makena Kelly / The Verge)

GitHub has become a repository for censored documents during the coronavirus crisis. Internet users in China are repurposing the open source software site to save news articles, medical journals, and personal accounts censored by the Chinese government. (Yi-Ling Liu / Wired)

Brazil is trying to address misinformation issues with a new bill that would violate the privacy and freedom of expression of its citizens. If it passes, it could be one of the most restrictive internet laws in the world. (Raphael Tsavkko Garcia / MIT Technology Review)

Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazons board of directors. Alexander served as the public face of US data collection during the Edward Snowden leaks. Heres Russell Brandom at The Verge:

Alexander is a controversial figure for many in the tech community because of his involvement in the widespread surveillance systems revealed by the Snowden leaks. Those systems included PRISM, a broad data collection program that compromised systems at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook but not Amazon.

Alexander was broadly critical of reporting on the Snowden leaks, even suggesting that reporters should be legally restrained from covering the documents. I think its wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000-whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these you know it just doesnt make sense, Alexander in an interview in 2013. We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I dont know how to do that. Thats more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, its wrong to allow this to go on.

Facebook launched new product called Campus, exclusively for college students. Its a new section of the main app where students can interact only with their peers, and it requires a .edu address to access. I say open it up to everyone. Worked last time! (Ashley Carman / The Verge)

Ninja returned to Twitch with a new exclusive, multiyear deal. Last August, he left Twitch for an exclusive deal with Mixer which shut down at the end of June. (Bijan Stephen / The Verge)

The Social Dilemma, the new Netflix documentary about the ills of big tech platforms, seems unclear on what exactly makes social media so toxic. It also oversimplifies the impact of social media on society as a whole. (Arielle Pardes / Wired)

You can make a deepfake without any coding experience in just a few hours. One of our reporters just did! (James Vincent / The Verge)

Stuff to occupy you online during the quarantine.

Choose your own election adventure. Explore some worst-case scenarios with this, uh, fun new game from Bloomberg.

Subscribe to The Verges new weekly newsletter about the pandemic. Mary Beth Griggs Antivirus brings you news from the vaccine and treatment fronts, and stories that remind us that theres more to the case counts than just numbers.

Subscribe to Kara Swishers new podcast for the New York Times. The first episode of her new interview show drops later this month.

Watch The Social Dilemma. The new social-networks-are-bad documentary is now on Netflix. People are talking about it!

Send us tips, comments, questions, and an overview of how your algorithms work: casey@theverge.com and zoe@theverge.com.

Continued here:

Three takeaways from a visit to TikToks new transparency center - The Verge

Top 15 DevOps blogs to read and follow – TechTarget

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Between the culture, processes, tools and latest trends, there is a lot to know about DevOps -- and there is no shortage of content across the internet that covers it all.

Depending on your DevOps interests and perspectives, that might be a good thing. For many, it's overwhelming to parse through all the case studies on adoption, technical recommendations and tutorials, product reviews, trends and latest news.

Don't get lost on the web. Check out these top 15 DevOps blogs from experienced developers, consultants, vendors and thought leaders across the industry.

The Agile Admin blog covers topics such as DevOps, Agile, cloud computing, infrastructure automation and open source, to name a few. It is run by sysadmins and developers Ernest Mueller, James Wickett, Karthik Gaekwad and Peco Karayanev. Beginners should start with this blog's thorough introduction to DevOps before they dive into deeper discussions and more technical subjects, such as site reliability engineering (SRE), monitoring and observability.

Apiumhub is a software development company in Barcelona. Its Apiumhub blog looks at Agile web and app development, industry trends, tools and, of course, DevOps. Readers will find expertise from the company's DevOps pros as well as tips from contributors. The blog discusses best practices for technical DevOps processes and includes other resources, such as a list of DevOps experts to follow.

Atlassian is a software company that offers products for software development, project management, collaboration and code quality. It also produces a bimonthly newsletter and blog site called Work Life, which includes a section about DevOps. The DevOps blog posts cover subjects such as DevSecOps, CI/CD integrations, compliance and toolchains. Also included are surveys with DevOps professionals. Be aware that some of the content is designed to align with the various products that Atlassian offers.

Microsoft's Azure DevOps blog does not post a lot of its own tutorials or tips, but instead publishes Azure updates and a weekly top stories roundup from across the web. While aimed primarily at Microsoft users, the blog offers useful insights for most anyone. The content changes weekly, sometimes with different themes that will expand a reader's knowledge.

The Capital One Tech blog posts go beyond DevOps to cover enterprise technology across the board, but regularly looks into the company's DevOps journey. With posts from Capital One's software engineers, this blog creatively breaks down its commitment to DevOps, from its pipeline design to creation of the open source, end-to-end monitoring tool Hygieia.

A diary of sorts for the online marketplace Etsy, Code as Craft publicly discusses the tools it uses, its software projects and experience with public cloud infrastructure. The blog posts are not laser-focused on DevOps, but are generally informative and review Etsy's experiments, some that might be outside the scope of the average developer.

The DevOpsGroup offers services to help enterprises adopt and maintain DevOps and the cloud. The company's blog focuses on the people behind DevOps, and tackles subjects such as burnout and the role of a scrum master. It also offers technical tutorials, such as how to set up Puppet -- as well as broader overviews, such as how to select CI/CD tools.

DZone, a site geared toward software developers, evolved from CEO Rick Ross' Javalobby to now cover 14 topics, or "zones," such as AI, cloud and Java, and a DevOps Zone. Tools, tutorials, news, oh my! Readers can find content about everything from Docker and Kubernetes to continuous delivery/continuous deployment and testing packaged in articles, webinars, research reports, short technical walkthroughs called "Refcardz," and even comics. Go in with a specific query or be prepared to spend time browsing.

The Everything DevOps Reddit thread is not technically a blog, but it is a valuable source for anyone interested in DevOps. With numerous threads daily, from Q&As to tips from DevOps practitioners, there is something for everyone. Readers will learn about the latest trends and practices for monitoring pipelines, mastering new DevOps skills and more.

Sean Hull, a DevOps and cloud solutions architect, runs his iHeavy blog with a more personable approach to talk about and teach DevOps. His posts present step-by-step tutorials and technical recommendations, but he also doles out advice for the less mechanical aspects of DevOps. For example, check out this post on how to handle people who say they are not paying invoices during a pandemic. The iHeavy blog also has a tab for CTO/CIO topics and advice for startups.

Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, founded IT Revolution to share DevOps practices and processes with the growing DevOps community. IT Revolution's blog posts dive into the culture of DevOps, with articles on leadership, communication and Agile practices. Blog authors include Kim and software development experts Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. In addition to the blog, IT Revolution publishes books, hosts events and supports research projects.

Agile coach and software engineer Mark Shead creates animated videos that explain basic DevOps and Agile concepts. These entertaining videos cover principals such as Agile transformation, methodology and user stories in short bursts -- perfect for people looking to dip their toes into DevOps or those who want a quick refresher.

This is another blog that provides an expansive look into how a large enterprise applies DevOps practices and principles to its operations. The Netflix Tech blog features posts written by Netflix's data scientists and software and site reliability engineers, giving readers a first-hand behind-the-screen view of one of the biggest streaming services. Topics span the enterprise's operations, from machine learning to data infrastructure, but there's plenty for DevOps fans to appreciate, such as Netflix's experiences with incident management, application monitoring and continuous delivery -- which includes some in-house tools, such as Spinnaker, which is now open source.

The Scott Hanselman blog is run by Scott Hanselman, a programmer, teacher, speaker and member of the web platform team at Microsoft. It averages about four posts a month -- going back as far as 2002 -- that vary from product reviews to Docker tutorials. This DevOps blog includes screenshots of what readers can expect to see when they try it for themselves as well as code examples.

Stackify is an application performance management vendor, but its DevOps blog covers information for anyone looking to learn more about DevOps with any software. It offers readers tricks, tips and resources, digging into best practices for broad topics such as adoption, implementation and security. It also provides detailed information for beginners on popular platforms, such as AWS, Kubernetes and Azure Container Service.

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Top 15 DevOps blogs to read and follow - TechTarget


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