BetaNews: Quickly manage Windows 10’s privacy and security settings with the open source Privatezilla . “We’ve covered Spydish on BetaNews before. The tool is great if you want to boost your privacy and security in Windows 10. Today Belim, the program’s developer, announces that Spydish has undergone a name change, becoming Privatezilla, and that’s not all. The program is also becoming open source. In order to achieve this, some important changes have been made, which includes replacing certain features.”
open source
Data Center Knowledge: New Foundation Aims to Tighten Security Across the Open Source Ecosystem
Data Center Knowledge: New Foundation Aims to Tighten Security Across the Open Source Ecosystem. “While proprietary software vendors and security companies still often sow FUD around open source security, the ‘many eyeballs’ theory — formulated by the open source pioneer Eric S. Raymond as, ‘Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’ — remains true. Open source software is generally as safe, if not safer, than its proprietary counterparts. However, there are problems unique to open source that need addressing, such as underfunded and understaffed projects, and open source development practices like copying and pasting code into new projects. The latter means that even when a security vulnerability is found in one project, it might go undetected within numerous other projects.”
Phys .org: High time to open up ecological research
Phys .org: High time to open up ecological research. “Share the code and data behind the research please. It’s easy, but it will have a major positive impact on progress and trust in science. That is the clear message from a new paper in PLOS Biology. An international team of ecologists found that currently, only about a quarter of the scientific papers in their field publicly shares computer code for analyses. ‘To make the science of ecology more transparent and reproducible, sharing is urgently needed.'”
BetaNews: New Chrome extension provides security check on open source code
BetaNews: New Chrome extension provides security check on open source code. “Developers frequently make use of open source components in order to speed up projects and save them having to reinvent tasks. But this can lead to the introduction of hidden security risks. Now though open source marketplace xs:code is launching a new, free Chrome extension, xs:code Insights, which provides users with intuitive, in-depth analytics on open source repositories, including repository score, security analysis, maintenance and activity status, reviews, ratings and more.”
Technology Networks: Database Offers Access to 200 Million Immune Sequences From COVID-19 Patients
Technology Networks: Database Offers Access to 200 Million Immune Sequences From COVID-19 Patients. “Across the world, many laboratories are conducting research relating to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, whether it be to understand the pathophysiology of COVID-19, or to develop robust diagnostics and efficacious therapeutics for the disease. As such, the pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of data sharing within the scientific community. The iReceptor Plus consortium, a European Union (EU)- and Canadian-funded project, has gathered 200 million T and B cell receptor sequences from COVID-19 patients – it is the largest repertoire of its kind. The sequencing data is open source and available online through the iReceptor Gateway.”
The Register: Linux Foundation starts new group to build pandemic-popping software
The Register: Linux Foundation starts new group to build pandemic-popping software. “The Linux Foundation has announced a new Public Health initiative (LFPH) that ‘builds, secures, and sustains open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) combat COVID-19 and future epidemics.'”
Phys .org: An open-source data platform for researchers studying archaea
Phys .org: An open-source data platform for researchers studying archaea. “To foster scientific exchange and to advance discovery, biologists in the School of Arts & Sciences led by postdoc Stefan Schulze and professor Mecky Pohlschroder have launched the Archaeal Proteome Project (ArcPP), a web-based database to collect and make available datasets to further the work of all scientists interested in archaea, a domain of life composed of microorganisms that can dwell anywhere from deep-sea vents to the human gut.”
ZDNet: GitHub just buried a giant open-source archive in an Arctic vault for 1,000 years
ZDNet: GitHub just buried a giant open-source archive in an Arctic vault for 1,000 years. “Microsoft-owned GitHub has finally moved its snapshot of all active public repositories on the site to a vault in Norway. GiHub announced the archiving plan last November and on February 20 followed through with the 21 terabyte snapshot written to 186 reels of film.”
VentureBeat: Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the ‘Hey Firefox’ wakeword for voice-based web browsing
VentureBeat: Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the ‘Hey Firefox’ wakeword for voice-based web browsing. “Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Common Voice now contains over 7,226 total hours of contributed voice data in 54 different languages, up from 1,400 hours across 18 languages in February 2019.”
ITPro Today: Meet the Groundswell of Open Source COVID-19 Efforts
ITPro Today: Meet the Groundswell of Open Source COVID-19 Efforts. “Open source communities around the world have been on the forefront of assisting medical researchers, health care professionals and government health agencies with research on the coronavirus responsible for the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the world.”
BetaNews: IBM launches open source tool to help COVID-19 data analysis
BetaNews: IBM launches open source tool to help COVID-19 data analysis. “COVID notebooks is designed to help with tasks including obtaining authoritative data on the current status of the outbreak, cleaning up the most serious data-quality problems, collating the data into a format amenable to easy analysis with tools like Pandas and Scikit-Learn, and building an initial set of example reports and graphs.”
EurekAlert: Predicting side effects
EurekAlert: Predicting side effects. “A multi-institutional group of researchers led by Harvard Medical School and the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research has created an open-source machine learning tool that identifies proteins associated with drug side effects.”
EurekAlert: Scientists produce first open source all-atom models of full-length COVID-19 ‘S’ protein
EurekAlert: Scientists produce first open source all-atom models of full-length COVID-19 ‘S’ protein. “The virus SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the known cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The ‘spike’ or S protein facilitates viral entry into host cells. Now a group of researchers from Seoul National University in South Korea, University of Cambridge in UK, and Lehigh University in USA, have worked together to produce the first open-source all-atom models of a full-length S protein. The researchers say this is of particular importance because the S protein plays a central role in viral entry into cells, making it a main target for vaccine and antiviral drug development.”
BetaNews: LibreOffice 7.0 Beta 1 arrives with ODF 1.3 document support
BetaNews: LibreOffice 7.0 Beta 1 arrives with ODF 1.3 document support . “The Document Foundation has released the first public beta of its upcoming LibreOffice 7.0 office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. Users are encouraged to download and test the software — which installs alongside any existing production release — ahead its final release, expected to be in August. The new release doesn’t boast any major new features, but does update ODF support to 1.3, plus unveils improvements both major and minor to the suite’s major components — in particular Writer.”
ParamSpider: New tool helps in the discovery of URL parameter vulnerabilities (The Daily Swig)
The Daily Swig: ParamSpider: New tool helps in the discovery of URL parameter vulnerabilities. “ParamSpider, a new open source tool, automates the discovery of parameters in URL addresses, a key step in probing websites and applications for vulnerabilities. Developed by indie security researcher Devansh Batham (aka Asm0d3us), the tool scrapes the parameters of a target website using the Internet Archive API. Bug bounty hunters and security researchers can then feed this data to a fuzzer to find potential vulnerabilities.”
