Google researchers are giving DALL-E a run for its money:

Our key discovery is that generic large language models (e.g. T5), pretrained on text-only corpora, are surprisingly effective at encoding text for image synthesis: increasing the size of the language model in Imagen boosts both sample fidelity and image-text alignment much more than increasing the size of the image diffusion model.

Dan Lorenc, from Google’s Infrastructure Security Team:

Software written in unsafe languages often contains hard-to-catch bugs that can result in severe security vulnerabilities, and we take these issues seriously at Google. That’s why we’re expanding our collaboration with the Internet Security Research Group to support the reimplementation of critical open-source software in memory-safe languages.

Notice he said “expanding our collaboration”, which must mean they’ve been doing this for a bit, but I wasn’t aware of the effort? An uplifting trend, regardless. Work is well underway:

The new Rust-based HTTP and TLS backends for curl and now this new TLS library for Apache httpd are an important starting point in this overall effort. These codebases sit at the gateway to the internet and their security is critical in the protection of data for millions of users worldwide.

Flutter for web is a code-compatible implementation of Flutter that is rendered using standards-based web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With Flutter for web, you can compile existing Flutter code written in Dart into a client experience that can be embedded in the browser and deployed to any web server. You can use all the features of Flutter, and you don’t need a browser plug-in.

This means Flutter is now on mobile, web, desktop, and embedded systems. What surprises me is how dedicated to Dart Google seems to be, despite community malaise and the success of TypeScript.

Love it or hate it, the march of AMP drives on…now your pages can appear under your URL instead of the google.com/amp URL.

Today we are rolling out support in Google Search’s AMP web results (also known as “blue links”) to link to signed exchanges, an emerging new feature of the web enabled by the IETF web packaging specification. Signed exchanges enable displaying the publisher’s domain when content is instantly loaded via Google Search. This is available in browsers that support the necessary web platform feature—as of the time of writing, Google Chrome—and availability will expand to include other browsers as they gain support (e.g. the upcoming version of Microsoft Edge).

As of January 2019, ClusterFuzz has found ~16,000 bugs in Chrome and ~11,000 bugs in over 160 open source projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz.

When they say “scalable”, they really mean it. This runs on over 25,000 machines at Google.

A great starter site for anyone interested in open source. It covers everything from open source history to copyrights and licenses. Bookmark this and send it to curious friends and/or people new to tech. 💯

Natasha Noy with the announcement:

Similar to how Google Scholar works, Dataset Search lets you find datasets wherever they’re hosted, whether it’s a publisher’s site, a digital library, or an author’s personal web page.

Open data is such a powerful tool when in the right hands. Hopefully this tool will help us find the datasets we need to make amazing things happen. 🤞

Why does this exist?

Containers are not a sandbox. While containers have revolutionized how we develop, package, and deploy applications, running untrusted or potentially malicious code without additional isolation is not a good idea. The efficiency and performance gains from using a single, shared kernel also mean that container escape is possible with a single vulnerability.

gVisor takes a distinct approach to container sandboxing and makes a different set of technical trade-offs compared to existing sandbox technologies, thus providing new tools and ideas for the container security landscape.

This is great news for those struggling to convince budget-makers that performance is worth their investment. Hopefully, it’ll also incentivize news sites to trim down and put their content front, center, and fast. 🙏

Google suggests Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights as resources to test how your pages are performing.