A legal reckoning is brewing in the world of open source chess engines. Stockfish, a GPL-licensed chess engine widely recognized as one of the strongest in the world, has filed a lawsuit against ChessBase. The German-based company makes and sells chess software that relies heavily on the Stockfish engine, maintains a prominent chess news site, and runs a chess server for online games.
Stockfish’s announcement, published this week on International Chess Day, claims that ChessBase has violated the GPL by not releasing the corresponding modifications of its products that are derivative works:
We have come to realize that ChessBase concealed from their customers Stockfish as the true origin of key parts of their products. Indeed, few customers know they obtained a modified version of Stockfish when they paid for Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini 6 – both Stockfish derivatives – and they thus have good reason to be upset. ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights. These rights are explicit in the license and include access to the corresponding sources, and the right to reproduce, modify, and distribute GPLed programs royalty-free.
In 2020, Stockfish added support for NNUE (Efficiently Updatable Neural Networks). ChessBase’s Fat Fritz 2 product includes a neural network that the company has not released. Stockfish’s previous statement on Fat Fritz 2 identifies these net weights as a derivative:
“This chess engine is a Stockfish derivative, with a few lines of code modification (engine name, authors list and a few parameters), and a new set of NNUE net weights considered proprietary,” current Stockfish maintainer Joost VandeVondele said. “ChessBase’s communication on Fat Fritz 2, claiming originality where there is none, has shocked our community. Furthermore, the engine Fat Fritz 2 fails to convince on independent rating lists, casting doubt on the usefulness of those modifications. Indeed, we feel that customers buying Fat Fritz 2 get very little added value for money. Claims to the contrary appear misleading.”
The GPLv3 permits ChessBase to sell its chess engine but requires the company to make its modifications available, along with all information needed to build the program. Stockfish informed Albert Silver, author of the neural net in Fat Fritz 2, of the license violation, resulting in ChessBase releasing its C++ sources but not the net weights. “Obviously, we condemn the approach taken,” VandeVondele said.
Stockfish contributors have been working with a certified copyright and media law attorney in Germany to enforce their license and were able to force a recall of the Fat Fritz 2 DVD and the termination of the sales of Houdini 6. They are now pursuing the Termination clause of the GPL that would shut down ChessBase’s ability to distribute Stockfish in its products.
“Due to Chessbase’s repeated license violations, leading developers of Stockfish have terminated their GPL license with ChessBase permanently,” the Stockfish team said in the most recent statement. “However, ChessBase is ignoring the fact that they no longer have the right to distribute Stockfish, modified or unmodified, as part of their products.”
In a post titled, “Fat Fritz 2 is a rip-off,” published earlier this year, the Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, and Lichess teams called out the product as a Stockfish clone, repackaged with a different neural network and “minimal changes that are neither innovative nor appear to make the engine stronger.”
“It is sad to see claims of innovation where there has been none, and claims of improvement in an engine that is weaker than its open-source origins,” the teams wrote. “It is also sad to see people appropriating the open-source work and effort of others and claiming it as their own.”
Lichess, a free and open-source Internet chess server run by a non-profit organization that also uses Stockfish as a critical part of its infrastructure, has published multiple posts in support of Stockfish revoking ChessBase’s license to sell derivatives of the popular engine. Lichess also publishes the source code of everything they create using Stockfish so its users can see, modify, and redistribute it.
Even if you’re not a connoisseur of chess drama, Lichess’ most recent statement of support for Stockfish identifies why this case is important to the greater open source community:
Free open-source software offers essential freedoms that benefit developers and users alike, and those freedoms should have been extended to users of Fat Fritz 1, 2, and Houdini. Failing that, free-software licenses are only meaningful if they are enforced, making this an important case not only for Stockfish, but also for the open source community as a whole. We are happy that the Stockfish developers have the will and means to take action.
Stockfish’s lawsuit may become an important landmark case for proving that the GPL can be enforced. It will also be interesting to see whether the courts regard the neural network weights that ChessBase trained as a derivative work that must be released as source code in order to be in compliance with the GPL.
Stockfish has gained broad support from the project’s maintainers and developers who have stated they “have the evidence, the financial means, and the determination to bring this lawsuit to a successful end.” The team has promised to update their statement once the case makes progress.
Normalization in a database is the process of organizing the data to reduce redundancy. The main idea is to segment a larger table into smaller ones and connect them through a relation.
But why should an end-user like you or me be concerned about Data Normalization?
These days, people are looking to automate many everyday actions within their organization. In a world where people are more commonly having smart homes, people get more used to having the bots do much of the tedious work. By becoming more comfortable in this venue, people are expecting more ways to automate tasks at work.
One of the everyday tasks that people need to get done in their work is generating documents. Whether this is contracts, employee on-boarding paperwork, brochures, statements, or invoices, creating documents using Adobe Document Generation can save a considerable amount of time copying and pasting content into Word documents. What’s more, it can also ensure that things are on-brand and consistent.
“API First” is something that often is mentioned when it comes to API strategy and other aspects of how to move to a more API-centric way of thinking in organizations. Oftentimes, “API First” is mentioned in the context of digital transformation initiatives and as one of the principles that should be applied as part of this initiative.
But what is “API First”? In reality, many organizations are not developing things from scratch, and when interpreted as “always designing the API before starting the implementation work,” this means that the reality of existing capabilities and the idea of developing APIs first seem to conflict.
Many mission-critical use cases require low latency data processing. Running these workloads close to the edge is mandatory if the applications cannot run in the cloud. This blog post explores architectures for low latency deployments leveraging a combination of cloud-native infrastructure at the edge, such as AWS Wavelength, 5G networks from Telco providers, and event streaming with Apache Kafka to integrate and process data in motion.
Google Lighthouse is the industry standard for testing website performance, and is now built into our SEO plugin, SmartCrawl.
Lighthouse has historically been able to run in several ways: as a Chrome DevTools, as a separate Chrome add-on (with a few restrictions), and as a Node package (incorporating it into your build process).
Now, you can do it from right within SmartCrawl’s dashboard (or if you’re a WPMU DEV member, from our streamlined Hub interface), without touching a line of code.
Continue reading for the full article, or use the links below to jump to any section:
Alright, let’s delve into this illuminating new feature.
Why Lighthouse?
Google’s Lighthouse beckons you to test the surfing waters.
Lighthouse is an open-source auditing tool that provides standardized scores across five areas:
Performance
Progressive Web App
Best Practices
Accessibility
SEO
Lighthouse runs performance tests using emulated data, also known as lab data. This is performance data collected within a controlled environment (with predefined device and network settings), and is helpful for assessing and debugging performance issues.
As mentioned in many of our optimization articles in the past, many variables go into your testing results. What Lighthouse tests via your local machine in a controlled environment does not equate 1:1 to real-world usage. Still, it is a useful indicator on the whole, and a valuable addition to your toolkit.
A Guided Lighthouse Tour
The Start of Something Big
In May of 2020, the Google-backed Chromium project announced a set of three metrics with which the browser would measure performance.
Known as Web Vitals, these metrics ― Loading, Interactivity, & Visual Stability ― became part of a Google initiative to provide guidance for quality signals.
With Web Core Vitals comprising more than half of Lighthouse’s performance score, the focus changed to new, more refined goals.
Looming Large: Page Experience
Google also announced in May of 2020 that Page Experience signals would be included in Google Search ranking.
The new Page Experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with Google’s existing search signals: Mobile-friendliness, Safe Browsing, HTTPS Security, and Intrusive Interstitial Guidelines.
Google’s Page Experience is slated to be complete by the end of August 2021, at which time it will join the hundreds of signals that Google considers when generating Search results.
Google’s Page Experience combines Core Web Vitals + Web Search signals.
What to Look for in Lighthouse Results
We know Google Lighthouse analyzes your site based on the five factors mentioned above; performance is simply the heaviest contributor to the score.
When you double click into performance, Google measures: First Contentful Paint (FCP); Speed Index (SI); Largest Contentful Paint (LCP); Time to Interactive (TTI); Total Blocking Time (TBT); Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
TBT has surpassed LCP in the latest version of Lighthouse, and is now weighted the heaviest in the score. TBT measures the total amount of time that a page is blocked from responding to user input, such as mouse clicks, screen taps, or keyboard presses. The sum is calculated by adding the blocking portion of all long tasks between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive.
Lighthouse scoring calculator allows you to select device type and scoring version.
The Lighthouse report also features some opportunities to improve the site speed of your mobile site, including how much loading time they will save. These include reducing render-blocking stylesheets, render-blocking scripts, properly sizing images, and fixing offscreen images.
Lighthouse gives you a tremendous amount of insight into the performance of your page. You can and should parlay these findings to your advantage.
Setting Up Lighthouse in SmartCrawl
Armed with the knowledge of how important search metrics are, let’s implement our supreme surveyor of SEO-ness, SmartCrawl. (Say that five times fast!!)
You will have the option to continue using SEO check ups, but we highly recommend switching to the new SEO Audits. With it, you’ll get the best of the web on your own site, ensuring it’s always optimized for search engine results ranking. (Also, please note that our SEO Checkup tool will become fully depreciated after the next few version releases.)
WordPress Dashboard Settings
After you install and activate SmartCrawl from your WP site, navigate to her dashboard and the Quick Setup Wizard will pop up.
SmartCrawl pre-selects the above options during quick setup.
Let’s leave all the pre-selected elements on, and click the Get Started button.
She’ll take a few seconds to do her thing, then the full dashboard with the various menus and markers will load. As you can see from the list of found issues, SmartCrawl ran her first test during the setup process.
SmartCrawl’s Checkup provides a comprehensive report of our site’s SEO optimization.
Before we try to fix anything, let’s switch from the SEO Checkup default to the new, recommended Google Lighthouse SEO. To do so, click on the Switch to Lighthouse SEO audits text.
Switching to Google Lighthouse through SEO Checkup settings.
From the SmartCrawl informational strip that loads at page top, click on the blue Try Lighthouse Audits button, which will take you to the settings panel.
Confirmation message after integrating the Google Lighthouse feature in settings.
Click on the Lighthouse Audits tab, select whether you want to scan Desktop or Mobile, then click Save Settings.
You can switch between Desktop & Mobile anytime in the Lighthouse Audits settings.
With Lighthouse Audits selected, you’ll now be viewing the SEO Audit screen and Dashboard widget.
Now let’s run a test using Lighthouse. From the dashboard, SEO Audits tab, click Run Test.
In this case, we’ve selected Desktop, so those are the results we’ll be capturing.
After running the test, SmartCrawl lays out her findings. SEO audits are divided into four categories: Content audits, Crawling and indexing audits, Responsive audits, and Manual audits. You can read about these in depth in SmartCrawl’s documentation.
One health test you’ll be glad to test positive for is SmartCrawls’s SEO.
Each Audit includes an overview, a status, and a description on best practices or how to fix. Click the dropdown arrow next to any listed audit to see suggestions on how to improve your SEO.
Single-click simplicity to all the fixes or recommendations SmartCrawl makes.
We recommend addressing as many of the identified issues as possible to ensure your site is the most SEO friendly.
(Re)Ports of Call
Reports are a great way to keep track of your all-important SEO indicators, and nip any issues in the bud. SmartCrawl brings this to the table with the ability to send SEO Audits Reports. There are two different kinds: Scheduled (automated), and Conditional.
For Scheduled Reports, you can choose the frequency ― daily, weekly, monthly― as well as which day of the week & what time of the day. You can also select which device types to include in said reports ― Desktop, Mobile, or both.
With Conditional Reports, you can select to send an SEO Audits Report based on degrees of variance from baseline values. Settings allow for triggering a report send when your SEO score drops below a specified threshold (any incremental percentage of ten, between 10 and 100).
To set up reports, go to Dashboard, Reporting, Emails & Report, and click on the plus sign for SEO Audits or Sitemap Crawler to get reports on each. (Note: Sitemap Crawler can do scheduled reports only.)
With SmartCrawl, SEO reports and email notifications come based on your selections.
From here you can cater to your preferences, having reports come at your will on selected days & times, or based on specific conditions.
Report sends can be automatic or conditionally based.
We’ve seen how easy and helpful controlling SmartCrawl’s settings through the WordPress dashboard can be. Now let’s look at what we can do with them through the Hub.
The Hub Settings
From WPMU Dev’s Hub 2.0, click on the SmartCrawl icon in line with any of your hosted sites, and it will install the plugin.
The green icons in these Hub settings indicate the plugin or feature is already installed & active.
The SmartCrawl splash screen comes into view, with a blue Install button. Let’s click that.
SmartCrawl shines a light in the darkness with her superior SEO skills.
A nearly identical screen loads, this time with a blue Run Test button, which we are going to click now.
A quick overview of your latest Lighthouse Audit results is provided below the SEO score.
Click any audit category to view additional details in SmartCrawl’s SEO Health screen.
Beneath Other SEO tools, you can select any listed items that you’d like displaying in your Hub. Clicking Activate on any of these will take you back to the WP plugin dashboard, where you will need to enter other pertinent information in order to include them as active panels in the Hub.
Some of the SEO tools require other information in order to activate them in the Hub.
For example, to see MozRank data, you will need to connect to your Moz account by providing your API credentials (Access ID and Secret Key).
Checking SEO tools via the Hub interface is visually pleasing, useful, and convenient, as users can view all their sites’ scores in the same place. And, this can be done in tandem with accessing the information through the WP plugin dashboard, or instead of it. It’s really nice having the option for both.
Advantages of Using Lighthouse SEO in SmartCrawl
Single Source Testing
With SmartCrawl’s Lighthouse SEO integration, users can check Desktop and Mobile audits, at the same time, from the same place. (On console, you would need to do this separately for each device.)
Fixes at Your Fingertips
SmartCrawl provides users with fixes for any issues directly in its UI. (Disclaimer: there are some audits that do not.)
Advice and Assistance At-the-Ready
SmartCrawl shows best practices & contextual help for each audit. (On console, you would be redirected to a separate Docs page.)
Send Scheduled Reports
SmartCrawl allows you to send regularly scheduled SEO Audits Reports.
Send Conditional Reports
SmartCrawl allows you to send SEO Audits Reports based on conditional changes.
Location, Location, Location
ALL of your sites’ scores are viewable in the SmartCrawl Dashboard. Or alternately… The Hub.
Hubba Hubba.
The Hub. This deserves a second shoutout, because it is just that cool and that useful. SmartCrawl’s powerful suite of SEO features are fully integrated with the Hub, so you can manage all your connected sites from a single, streamlined point of access.
A Beacon of Light(house)
Most users won’t be clocking speed scores when they visit your site; but they will remember whether the experience felt fast or slow (with the line between the two separated by milliseconds). We’re living in the tech-forward 2020’s, and most folks won’t settle for delayed gratification.
SmartCrawl is free, and packed with benefits. But if you really want to go full throttle, opt for the ultimate bundle of SEO tools & services, with all of our highly rated plugins, plus our 5-star 24/7 support. There’s no commitment! You can do a free trial of our full membership, or our fully dedicated individual site hosting service. If you’re not completely happy, we’ll refund your hard-earned moolah.
Whoever you use as a hosting service, and whatever plugins or tools you avail yourself of, keep Google Lighthouse and Page Experience signals in mind, and make sure your tools & providers are trusted and reliable.
Over 25 percent of employees don’t trust their employers, and an even greater 50 percent think that their employers aren’t open or upfront with them. The lack of trust among employees is due to the lack of transparency in the workplace.
In digitally transformed organizations with digitized workflows, decentralized teams, and remote employees, embracing and maintaining transparency across different workplace tools can become even more difficult.
Defender, our answer to WordPress security, just beefed things up even more with his new Google reCAPTCHA feature! Google reCAPTCHA ensures that it’s a human that enters your site instead of automated spammers that can wreak havoc.
As you’ll see, it’s as easy as ever to get reCAPTCHA activated in just a few clicks. We’ll break it all down and show you how.
You might be aware of this feature if you’ve logged in to Defender recently. He’s pretty excited about it.
By the end of this brief article, you’ll know how to put the cap on bots and spammers with reCAPTCHA.
Activate Google reCAPTCHA
To get started, you’ll need to activate reCAPTCHA from Defender’s dashboard. That’s as easy as going to Tools, then Google reCAPTCHA.
Once there, click Activate.
One click is all it takes to get started.
As soon as you hit activate, it’s not ready to go unless you have your Site and Secret keys set up. Defender will let you know if you don’t.
If you get the yellow exclamation mark, you still need to set up your keys.
No keys? Let’s create them. Defender makes this easy by having a link to get the keys created. Just click, you guessed it, Click Here.
This is located directly below the yellow exclamation mark.
Clicking this opens up a new tab on Google’s reCAPTCHA page.
The first thing you’ll do is name the Label. The Label helps you identify the site for future reference.
Label it something you can associate with.
Once you have a label, the next part leads us to…
Choose a reCAPTCHA Type
You now choose a reCAPTCHA Type in Defender and Google.
It’s important to note that during registration in Google, you’ll need to select the same reCAPTCHA type you selected in the Defender interface, as each reCAPTCHA type requires a different set of API keys.
It’s up to you if you want to pick a type in Defender or Google first. Either way, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re the same.
Since we’re already in Google, we’ll select a type here first. You have the option of reCAPTCHA v3 (verifies requests with a score) and reCAPTCHA v2 (verifies requests with a challenge).
Whatever you choose will create a unique key.
Once you decided which type is best for you, you’ll enter the domain and accept the reCAPTCHA Terms of Service. You can also opt to have alerts sent to the owner (you and your email).
Hit Submit, and it will generate your keys.
As you can see, two unique keys were created.
It’s now time to implement them in Defender, so we’ll head on back into Defender’s dashboard and get these activated!
For this example, I chose to create keys using reCAPTCHA v2. Therefore, I’ll select the same option in Defender.
You can pick between v2 Checkbox or v2 invisible for reCAPTCHA v2. For this demonstration, I’ll use v2 Invisible (I’ll touch more on v2 Checkbox and v3 a bit later).
The choice is yours on what style you’d like.
Enter the site keys from Google in the spaces provided, click Save Changes at the bottom of the screen, and Defender will give you a preview of what your reCAPTCHA will look like.
You get a great glimpse of how your reCAPTCHA will appear.
Now that you know how to set up specific reCAPTCHA types, let’s…
Configure reCAPTCHA
There’s a lot you can do when it comes to configuring Defender’s reCAPTCHA. We’ll take a look at how to edit:
Language
Error Message
reCAPTCHA Locations
As you’ll see, each customization option is simple to adjust however you’d like.
Language
You can pick what language you want your reCAPTCHA to be in. By default, it’s on Automatic. That means that whatever language your WordPress site is in — the reCAPTCHA will be that language, too.
That being said, choose from tons of other languages in the dropdown. Or type in a language in the search bar.
As you can see, there are quite a few languages to choose from.
Once you have the language set up how you want it, click Save Changes.
Error Message
It’s easy to create a custom error message to display when a user’s reCAPTCHA verification fails.
Just add the message you want and hit Save Changes.
This will tell your users what happened and what to do next.
Edit and change this message at any time.
reCAPTCHA Locations
reCAPTCHA Locations is where you choose the forms where reCAPTCHA human verification will be required. You can choose to have reCAPTCHA implemented for WordPress Login, Register, and Lost Password forms.
It’s just a matter of clicking which ones where you want reCAPTCHA to be deployed.
One-click is all it takes!
Style reCAPTCHA
With Defender’s v2 Checkbox, you can style the reCAPTCHA in several ways.
The Size can be adjusted to either Normal or Compact from the dropdown menu.
Choose a size that suits you best.
When it comes to the Theme, you can pick between Light and Dark.
It’s all quick to get to in the dropdown menu.
Check out how your reCAPTCHA looks by hitting Save Changes. Once doing so, it’ll show you a preview.
This is a look at a standard size with a light theme.
If all looks awesome, you’re all set! You can also go in and edit at any time if you’d like to make some adjustments.
Adding a reCAPTCHA Score
reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score that is based on user interactions. This score can be adjusted and changed to wherever you want the verification to fail.
Change the Score Threshold to 0-1. One is very probable it’s a good interaction, and zero is very likely it’s a bot.
It can be changed quickly in Defender’s dropdown.
Pick a threshold between zero and one.
Hit Save Changes and your threshold is saved.
Defender’s reCAPTHCA is CAPTCHA-vating
To help defend your site against bots and spammers, it’s as captivating as ever to use Defender’s Google reCAPTCHA for your WordPress site!
It will help ensure that your site is used by real humans for your forms, logins, and visitors — which assists with preventing abuse, stopping hackers from harvesting email addresses, and putting a hault to automated signups & registrations.
If you don’t have Defender, give it a try today for free. Also, for upgraded security features, try out Defender Pro with a free WPMU DEV 7-day trial. You’ll also get access to all of our other premium plugins, 24-7 service, our all-in-one WordPress site manager, The Hub, and more.
Defender, our answer to WordPress security, just beefed things up even more with his new Google reCAPTCHA feature! Google reCAPTCHA ensures that it’s a human that enters your site instead of automated spammers that can wreak havoc.
As you’ll see, it’s as easy as ever to get reCAPTCHA activated in just a few clicks. We’ll break it all down and show you how.
You might be aware of this feature if you’ve logged in to Defender recently. He’s pretty excited about it.
By the end of this brief article, you’ll know how to put the cap on bots and spammers with reCAPTCHA.
Activate Google reCAPTCHA
To get started, you’ll need to activate reCAPTCHA from Defender’s dashboard. That’s as easy as going to Tools, then Google reCAPTCHA.
Once there, click Activate.
One click is all it takes to get started.
As soon as you hit activate, it’s not ready to go unless you have your Site and Secret keys set up. Defender will let you know if you don’t.
If you get the yellow exclamation mark, you still need to set up your keys.
No keys? Let’s create them. Defender makes this easy by having a link to get the keys created. Just click, you guessed it, Click Here.
This is located directly below the yellow exclamation mark.
Clicking this opens up a new tab on Google’s reCAPTCHA page.
The first thing you’ll do is name the Label. The Label helps you identify the site for future reference.
Label it something you can associate with.
Once you have a label, the next part leads us to…
Choose a reCAPTCHA Type
You now choose a reCAPTCHA Type in Defender and Google.
It’s important to note that during registration in Google, you’ll need to select the same reCAPTCHA type you selected in the Defender interface, as each reCAPTCHA type requires a different set of API keys.
It’s up to you if you want to pick a type in Defender or Google first. Either way, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re the same.
Since we’re already in Google, we’ll select a type here first. You have the option of reCAPTCHA v3 (verifies requests with a score) and reCAPTCHA v2 (verifies requests with a challenge).
Whatever you choose will create a unique key.
Once you decided which type is best for you, you’ll enter the domain and accept the reCAPTCHA Terms of Service. You can also opt to have alerts sent to the owner (you and your email).
Hit Submit, and it will generate your keys.
As you can see, two unique keys were created.
It’s now time to implement them in Defender, so we’ll head on back into Defender’s dashboard and get these activated!
For this example, I chose to create keys using reCAPTCHA v2. Therefore, I’ll select the same option in Defender.
You can pick between v2 Checkbox or v2 invisible for reCAPTCHA v2. For this demonstration, I’ll use v2 Invisible (I’ll touch more on v2 Checkbox and v3 a bit later).
The choice is yours on what style you’d like.
Enter the site keys from Google in the spaces provided, click Save Changes at the bottom of the screen, and Defender will give you a preview of what your reCAPTCHA will look like.
You get a great glimpse of how your reCAPTCHA will appear.
Now that you know how to set up specific reCAPTCHA types, let’s…
Configure reCAPTCHA
There’s a lot you can do when it comes to configuring Defender’s reCAPTCHA. We’ll take a look at how to edit:
Language
Error Message
reCAPTCHA Locations
As you’ll see, each customization option is simple to adjust however you’d like.
Language
You can pick what language you want your reCAPTCHA to be in. By default, it’s on Automatic. That means that whatever language your WordPress site is in — the reCAPTCHA will be that language, too.
That being said, choose from tons of other languages in the dropdown. Or type in a language in the search bar.
As you can see, there are quite a few languages to choose from.
Once you have the language set up how you want it, click Save Changes.
Error Message
It’s easy to create a custom error message to display when a user’s reCAPTCHA verification fails.
Just add the message you want and hit Save Changes.
This will tell your users what happened and what to do next.
Edit and change this message at any time.
reCAPTCHA Locations
reCAPTCHA Locations is where you choose the forms where reCAPTCHA human verification will be required. You can choose to have reCAPTCHA implemented for Login, Register, and Lost Password forms.
It’s just a matter of clicking which ones where you want reCAPTCHA to be deployed.
One-click is all it takes!
Style reCAPTCHA
With Defender’s v2 Checkbox, you can style the reCAPTCHA in several ways.
The Size can be adjusted to either Normal or Compact from the dropdown menu.
Choose a size that suits you best.
When it comes to the Theme, you can pick between Light and Dark.
It’s all quick to get to in the dropdown menu.
Check out how your reCAPTCHA looks by hitting Save Changes. Once doing so, it’ll show you a preview.
This is a look at a standard size with a light theme.
If all looks awesome, you’re all set! You can also go in and edit at any time if you’d like to make some adjustments.
Adding a reCAPTCHA Score
reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score that is based on user interactions. This score can be adjusted and changed to wherever you want the verification to fail.
Change the Score Threshold to 0-1. One is very probable it’s a good interaction, and zero is very likely it’s a bot.
It can be changed quickly in Defender’s dropdown.
Pick a threshold between zero and one.
Hit Save Changes and your threshold is saved.
Defender’s reCAPTHCA is CAPTCHA-vating
To help defend your site against bots and spammers, it’s as captivating as ever to use Defender’s Google reCAPTCHA for your WordPress site!
It will help ensure that your site is used by real humans for your forms, logins, and visitors — which assists with preventing abuse, stopping hackers from harvesting email addresses, and putting a hault to automated signups & registrations.
If you don’t have Defender, give it a try today for free. Also, for upgraded security features, try out Defender Pro with a free WPMU DEV 7-day trial. You’ll also get access to all of our other premium plugins, 24-7 service, our all-in-one WordPress site manager, The Hub, and more.
Debrief from a Vaticle Community talk — featuring Konrad Myśliwiec, Scientist, Systems Biology, at Roche. This talk was delivered virtually at Orbit 2021 in April.
Konrad, like so many TypeDB community members, comes from a diverse engineering background. Knowledge graphs have been part of his scope since working on an enterprise knowledge graph for GSK. He’s been a part of the TypeDB community for roughly 3 years. While most of his career has been spent in the biomedical industry, he’s spent time working on business intelligence applications, developing mobile apps and currently as a data science engineer in the RGITSC (Roche Global IT Solutions Centre) for Roche Pharmaceuticals.
CockroachDB is a cloud-native distributed database that works across various cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments. The flexibility of deployments demands varying degrees of security protocols. Most of the time, on-premise customers won't accept anything less than Kerberos for their system of record authentication mechanisms. In my Hadoop time, that was the bare minimum requirement to play. CockroachDB today supports Kerberos via GSSAPI for authentication.
In this post, I'm going to walk you through setting up Kerberos for CockroachDB and provide a sort of cheat sheet, to make this process more seamless. I'm using a single Centos VM provisioned with Vagrant. It servers as my KDC as well as my CockroachDB instance. On to the setup. The following documents may assist in the entire process: CockroachDB GSSAPI, how to install CockroachDB and configuring CockroachDB for secure access. I recorded the entire process with Asciinema, I split the screencast into two parts.
TL; DR: How to Win with Agile Resistant Teams with Scott Weiner — ACB21
In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Scott Weiner shares a case study on how to master an agile transition by creating agile resistant teams based on common sense, team autonomy, and the psychology of metrics.
How to Win With Agile Resistant Teams
Agile teams don’t begin as Agile teams. They begin as a group of people with a purpose. Sometimes those teams want to embrace Agile approaches because they believe they understand the benefits and see a path forward. Often times that path is more difficult than they thought because they misunderstood the subtlety and importance of various aspects of the agile mindset and various methods. Often the team will ignore or misunderstand the significance of the external environment on their ability to be successful and will fight the wrong battles and become frustrated and even feel defeated sometimes. Other times agility is (ironically) mandated by the larger organization looking for perceived benefits or just looking for a level of standardization of methodology and approach.
We're living in the golden age of databases, as money flows into the industry at historical rates (e.g., Snowflake, MongoDB, Cockroach Labs, Neo4j). If the debate between relational vs. non-relational or online analytical processing (OLAP) vs. online transaction processing (OLTP) ruled the past decade, a new type of database has been steadily growing in popularity. According to DB-Engines, an initiative to collect and present information on database management systems, time series databases are the fastest growing sector since 2020:
Why Use a Time Series Database?
Time series databases (TSDB) are databases optimized to ingest, process, and store timestamped data. Such data may include metrics from servers and applications, readings from IoT sensors, user interaction on a website or an app, or trading activity on financial markets.
Unit tests are the developer's number one safety net. Let that sink in. This is the number one reason for writing unit tests.
Unit tests are written by developers for developers to ensure that the code works as expected and handles happy and sad paths correctly. With enough unit test coverage, the tests enable a safe environment for refactoring and rewriting code.
Sitemaps allow a webmaster to provide search engines with a list of URLs on a website that are available for crawling; this can be especially helpful if you’re attempting to increase your page rank. In addition to providing the list of URLs, sitemaps also supply information about each individual URL, such as relevancy to the website, update times, and change frequency.
Since the internet is a pretty crowded place, it is incredibly important to take the proper steps to ensure your site is getting the highest amount of traffic possible. If your website is just getting started and you are looking to increase traffic, creating a sitemap can assist search engines by providing insight into pages that are new, recently updated, or not immediately accessible through the browsable interface.
