FOSS Force: IBM Unveils ‘Open Source Cloud Guide’ at All Things Open. “One of the announcements made at this year’s All Things Open conference in Raleigh came on Monday when IBM unveiled an Open Source Cloud Guide, which offers a vendor and cloud agnostic view of open source developer tools.”
EPFL: Explore The Most Detailed Map Of The Universe. “Have you ever wanted to explore outer-space? Now you can, without leaving Earth, thanks to powerful, open-source beta software VIRUP that builds – in real-time – a virtual universe based on the most detailed contemporary astrophysical and cosmological data.”
ZDNet: Google is backing security reviews of these key open-source projects. “Google recently pledged $100 million to groups that manage open-source security priorities and help fix vulnerabilities, and it has now detailed eight of the projects it has chosen to support.”
VentureBeat: Open source can boost EU economy and digital autonomy, study finds. “A new report from the European Commission (EC) sheds light on the impact open source software (OSS) and open source hardware (OSH) could have on the European Union (EU) economy.”
Hackaday: Making Web Pages With Word?. “There are, of course, other ways of generating web pages from your technical documentation — there is the Markdown / Pandoc combination, various Wiki solutions, or GitHub Pages, for example. If you’re Python-focused, there’s always the Jupyter Notebooks / JupyterLab approach which we wrote about in 2019. But these presume the source documents are in a certain format. If you have years of existing documentation in Word, or you prefer (or are required) to use Word, [Jim Yuill]’s WWN tool might be of interest.”
ReviewGeek: EA Makes Its Best Accessibility Gaming Tech Available to All Developers. “EA is opening the patents for five of its accessibility technologies, which are useful for both gaming and general software design. Any person or business can use these technologies for free, and EA has even open-sourced some code to make adoption and adaptation easier. Most of EA’s accessibility tech revolves around colorblindness and low vision.”
Make: Hacking Garbage Trucks to Bring Broadband to Those in Need. “Millions of households lack the broadband access they need to learn from home, work from home, and generally keep up in our internet-dependent world. What if cities could pinpoint which neighborhoods were in need? What if cities collected real-time information that got services to the people who need them most? And what if they could do it faster and cheaper? They can. One city is bucking the system and using open source hardware, DIY ingenuity, and a pandemic-induced urgency to address the digital divide in real-time, paving the way for others to do the same.”
ZDNet: Does anyone really know what time it is? Facebook does. “Our technology can’t work worth a darn if the Network Time Protocol (NTP) isn’t keeping our servers and PCs coordinated with one another. Without it, backups would fail, financial transactions would go awry, and many fundamental network services wouldn’t work. To help with these issues, Facebook started making its internet clocks more accurate in 2020. Now, the social media giant is open-sourcing its technology, Time Appliances Project (TAP), and enabling anyone to turn a commodity server into a reliable NTP time appliance.”
Protocol: Want to succeed on GitHub? Your odds are better if you’re white. . “Software developers with white-sounding names may have more success on GitHub than developers whose names are perceived as Black, Hispanic or Asian-Pacific Islander, according to a recently published study.”
Georgia Tech: New Open-source Tool Gives Cybersecurity Pros an Integrated Approach to Combat Malware. “A new open-source cybersecurity technique called Forecast from the Georgia Institute of Technology is able to identify the capabilities that malware is planning to use in an attack before those capabilities are deployed. The all-in-one tool then predicts or ranks the likelihood of each possible staged attack – in less than five minutes on average.”
Live Science: Book of the Dead fragments, half a world apart, are pieced together. “The two linen fragments were pieced together after a digital image of one segment was cataloged on an open-source online database by the Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Historians at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles who saw the image quickly realized that the institute had a shroud fragment that, like a puzzle piece, fit together with the New Zealand segment.”
Ars Technica: No, open source Audacity audio editor is not “spyware”. “Over the fourth of July weekend, several open source news outlets began warning readers that the popular open source audio editing app Audacity is now “spyware.” This would be very alarming if true—there aren’t any obvious successors or alternatives which meet the same use cases. Audacity is free and open source, relatively easy to use, cross platform, and ideally suited for simple “prosumer” tasks like editing raw audio into finished podcasts. However, the negativity seems to be both massively overblown and quite late.” Unlike many outlets, the Ars Technica comment section is usually worth a read. It’s definitely the case with this article.
EurekAlert: New data science platform speeds up Python queries. “Researchers from Brown University and MIT have developed a new data science framework that allows users to process data with the programming language Python — without paying the ‘performance tax’ normally associated with a user-friendly language.” The new platform is free.
