Episode #268: Edwin Kwan: Security Assessed Apps Now Receives Badge on Google Play Store; Olimpiu Pop: StarCoder - An Open Source State Of The Art Code LLM; Katy Craig: China’s Global Cyber Power; Marcel Brown: This Day in Tech History

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The stories we’re covering today.

Marcel Brown: November 8, 1895. German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen stumbles upon what he would later describe as "X-rays" while experimenting with electrical discharge tubes. Curious as to what was causing a faint green glow on a nearby fluorescent screen, Röntgen began systematically studying the unknown rays and published the first paper on the phenomenon less than two months later.

Edwin Kwan: Google Play Store has rolled out a new badge to highlight apps that have been independently security reviewed. Google has emphasized that the security validation process only checks if a developer has prioritized security and privacy practices, it does not imply that the validated app is free of vulnerabilities

Katy Craig:  In recent years, Chinese state-sponsored cyber operations have transformed into a more mature and coordinated threat. They now focus on exploiting vulnerabilities in public-facing security and network appliances, both known and zero-day. Chinese cyber-enabled economic espionage has evolved towards a more targeted approach, supporting specific strategic and geopolitical goals, such as the Belt and Road Initiative.

Olimpiu Pop: BigCode is an initiative from HuggingFace to provide open-source, state-of-the-art models for code generation. StarCoder is one of the stars, maybe the brightest. It was the outcome of refined training with Python tokens of StarCoderBase.