today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 28, 2024

• EFF ☛ Podcast Episode: Open Source Beats Authoritarianism

• Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Open-source software worth a lot more than you pay for it

  A new estimate from researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto finds that the worldwide value of all open-source software is about US$8.8-trillion. To place that in perspective, about $3.4-trillion was spent on commercial software globally in 2020. The $8.8-trillion figure is more than double the current GDP of India at current market exchange rates. It’s almost triple the latest market capitalisations of Apple and Microsoft. All the gold in the world is currently worth more than $13-trillion, give or take.

• Server

  • ThreatHunter.ai Halts Hundreds of Attacks in the past 48 hours: Combating Ransomware and Nation-State Cyber Threats Head-On

    Cyberwire The current large surge in cyber threats has left many organizations grappling for security so ThreatHunter.ai is taking decisive action.

  • How Platform-as-a-Product Drives Cloud-Native Platform Maturity

    In the clown-native ecosystem, the number-one factor for a successful platform is treating it as a product. But what does that really mean?

  • Ubuntu ☛ Canonical announces the general availability of Charmed Kafka

    Apache Kafka is an event store that supports a range of contemporary applications including microservices architectures, streaming analytics and AI/ML use cases. Canonical Charmed Kafka simplifies deployment and operation of Kafka across public clouds and private data centres alike. The free, open source solution is offered with comprehensive support and security maintenance, so teams can work with complete peace of mind.

• Benchmarks

  • Comparison of Nvidia Grace GH200 vs. Threadripper 7000: Linux Benchmark Analysis

    The review detailed a head-to-head comparison between Nvidia's Grace and AMD's Threadripper CPUs, particularly focusing on the performance of the Grace CPU against the Threadripper 7980X and Threadripper Pro 7995WX in a Linux environment. The testing platform was a GPTshop.ai workstation equipped with Nvidia's Grace-Hopper GH200, which includes both a Grace CPU and a Hopper-based H200 GPU.

    Phoronix recently conducted a comprehensive comparison, pitting Nvidia's Grace server CPU against AMD's Threadripper 7980X and Threadripper Pro 7995WX processors through 39 Linux-based benchmarks. These tests were designed to assess the performance capabilities of the processors in various applications. Although Nvidia's Grace exhibited strong performance, it was marginally outperformed by AMD's Threadripper lineup in certain benchmarks.

• Programming/Development

  • Trail of Bits ☛ Circomspect has been integrated into the Sindri CLI

    Our tool Circomspect is now integrated into the Sindri command-line interface (CLI)! We designed Circomspect to help developers build Circom circuits more securely, particularly given the limited tooling support available for this novel programming framework.

  • Andy Wingo: on the impossibility of composing finalizers and ffi

    While poking the other day at making a Guile binding for Harfbuzz, I remembered why I don’t much do this any more: it is impossible to compose GC with explicit ownership.

    Allow me to illustrate with an example. Harfbuzz has a concept of blobs, which are refcounted sequences of bytes. It uses these in a number of places, for example when loading OpenType fonts. You can get a peek at the blob’s contents back with hb_blob_get_data, which gives you a pointer and a length.