Jenkins has announced the beta version of its new Declarative Pipeline Syntax. Currently Jenkins provides a Scripted Pipeline Syntax. The Declarative Pipeline is not meant to replace the Script Pipeline, but extend it so users don’t have to worry about scripting at every aspect during the pipeline, according to the Jenkins team.
“Declarative Pipeline enables all users to connect simple, declarative blocks that define build agents (including Docker), post build actions, environment settings, credentials and all stages that make up the pipeline. Best of all, because this Declarative syntax is part of Pipeline, all build steps and build wrappers available in Plugins or loaded from Shared Libraries are also available as steps in Declarative,” the Jenkins team wrote in a blog post.
The new pipeline syntax will work with Jenkins new project: Blue Ocean.
Google releases new security testing tool
Google has announced a new open-source solution designed to test cryptographic software libraries against known weaknesses and attacks. Project Wycheproof provides a collection of unit tests designed to check for expected behaviors.
“In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, and mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat too often and remain undiscovered for too long. Good implementation guidelines, however, are hard to come by: understanding how to implement cryptography securely requires digesting decades’ worth of academic literature. We recognize that software engineers fix and prevent bugs with unit testing, and we found that many cryptographic issues can be resolved by the same means,” Daniel Bleichenbacher and Thai Duong, security engineers at Google, wrote in a post.
OpenSSH releases version 7.4
OpenSSH, a complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation, has just released OpenSSH 7.4. With this release, the team announced plans to retire legacy cryptography in future releases.
Specifically, OpenSSH will remove remaining support for the SSH version 1 protocol, and in the same release remove support for Blowfish, RC4 ciphers and the RIPE-MD160 HMAC.
In addition, OpenSSH 7.4 comes with a number of changes that will impact existing configurations.
The full list of features can be found here.
Microsoft creates free dataset for researchers
Microsoft has created a new dataset called MS MARCO. According to the company, researchers can use this dataset breakthrough the machine reading industry and advance Microsoft’s long-term goal of artificial general intelligence.
“In order to move towards artificial general intelligence, we need to take a step towards being able to read a document and understand it as well as a person,” Rangan Majumder, a partner group program manager with Microsoft’s Bing search engine division who is leading the effort, said in a statement. “This is a step in that direction.”
The dataset includes a set of 100,000 questions and answers that artificial intelligence researchers can use to create different systems with the ability to read and answer questions just like humans. These datasets can also be used to teach AI systems to recognize questions and formulate answers.
More information can be found here.
