Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream. (I think of Inrupt basically as the Red Hat of Solid.) I joined the Inrupt team last summer as its Chief of Security Architecture, and have been in stealth mode until now.

The idea behind Solid is both simple and extraordinarily powerful. Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things -- your computer, your phone, your IoT whatever -- is written to your pod. You authorize granular access to that pod to whoever you want for whatever reason you want. Your data is no longer in a bazillion places on the Internet, controlled by you-have-no-idea-who. It's yours. If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. If you want your friends to have access to your vacation photos, you grant it through your pod. If you want your thermostat to share data with your air conditioner, you give both of them access through your pod.

World wide web founder scales up efforts to reshape internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt is Redesigning the way the web is to Work and Apple is working with them on their Data Transfer Project

Inrupt, the start-up company founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to redesign the way the web works, is expanding its operational team and launching pilot projects in its quest to develop a "massively scalable, production-quality technology platform."

Inconsistent user-experiences with native lazy-loading images

The specification for web browser native support for lazy-loading images landed in the HTML Living Standard a week ago. This new feature lets web developers tell the browser to defer loading an image until it is scrolled into view, or it’s about to be scrolled into view. Images account for 49 % of the median webpage’s byte size, according to the HTTP Archive. Lazy image loading can help reduce these images’ impact on page load performance. It can also help lower data costs by clients that never scroll down to images far down on a page. Historically, lazy-loading was implemented by responding to changes in the scroll position and tracking the image element’s offset from the top of the page. This could degrade page-scrolling performance. Comparatively, the new native lazy loading for images is easier to implement and doesn’t degrade scrolling performance.

Malware Attack Takes ISS World's Systems Offline

Founded in 1901, the Copenhagen, Denmark-based company provides cleaning, support, property, catering, security, and facility management services for offices, factories, airports, hospitals, and other locations all around the world.

At the moment, the company’s employees don’t have access to corporate systems, as they were taken offline following a malware attack earlier this week.

The rise and rise of ransomware [iophk: Windows TCO]

Security flaws belatedly fixed in open source SuiteCRM software

According to Romano, a second-order PHP object injection vulnerability (CVE-2020-8800) in SuiteCRM could be “exploited to inject arbitrary PHP objects into the application scope, allowing an attacker to perform a variety of attacks, such as executing arbitrary PHP code”. SuiteCRM versions 7.11.11 and below are said to be vulnerable. [...] “We have put a notice on our open source community channels and advice via social media. We have a dedicated community that works around the clock to spot vulnerabilities and produce suitable fixes, which is one of the key benefits for a business when choosing to use open source software.”

With the rise of third-party code, zero-trust is key

The surface area of website and web application attacks keeps growing. One reason for this is the prevalence of third-party code. When businesses build web apps, they use code from many sources, including both commercial and open-source projects, often created and maintained by both professional and amateur developers. Web application creators take advantage of third-party code because it allows them to build their websites and apps quickly. For example, companies are likely to add a third-party chat widget to their site, instead of building one from scratch. But third-party code can leave websites vulnerable. Consider the July 2018 Magecart attack on Ticketmaster. In this data breach, hackers were able to gain access to sensitive customer information on Ticketmaster's website by compromising a third-party script used to provide chatbot functionality. The challenge is that this third-party functionality runs directly on the customer's browser, and the browser is built to simply render the code sent down from a web server. It assumes that all code, whether first-party or third-party, is good.

New company BluBracket takes on software supply chain code security

BluBracket scores $6.5M seed to help secure code in distributed environments

BluBracket, a new security startup from the folks who brought you Vera, came out of stealth today and announced a $6.5 million seed investment. Unusual Ventures led the round with participation by Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures.

Can Janne Kyttanen Change the World through Open Source Construction?

Time for open minds on open source platforms [Ed: Any sort of collaboration on something is now framed as "open source"]

Big open source transparent value-adding collaborative projects are already proven in other industries. Where is ours? Why don’t we have this? Imagine if we could all see which fuel filter manufacturer provided the best bang for our buck. How much would we reduce our waste by not going through cheap fuel filters? Imagine if we could see which lube oil provider had the best life cycle of lube oil provision; how much could we reduce our scope three emissions? What about collaborating and sharing on infrastructure projects within the countries and the ports that we operate on? How quickly can we address the issue of not having power and a shore base. I think the days of holding on to data and trying to work in silos is absolutely behind us.

Databricks CEO: Managing open source in the cloud is hard [Ed: ComputerWeekly bases its articles about “Open Source” on a proprietary software company, Microsoft, with its own claims (about its competition)]

Microsoft's coding for noobs hits 1.0, decompiling to C# in Visual Studio, and Windows 10X makes its debut... on Mac [Ed: This is classic openwashing of frameworks that actually make one heavily dependent on proprietary frameworks/systems with back doors and EULA mazes]

Microsoft's GitHub to open offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad [Ed: Salaries of GitHub staff decreasing]

Microsoft's ION Is an Open-Source Bet on Bitcoin [Ed: There's a FOSS project called ION. Guess what Microsoft did. The usual, hijacking other people's brands, causing confusion.]

Microsoft’s ION Is an Open-Source Bet on Bitcoin

This could be Microsoft's most important product in 2020. If it works [Ed: CBS -- the parent company of CNET/ZDNet -- disguises marketing and openwashing and Microsoft spam as 'article'. CBS is aware that a proprietary OS, Windows, has back doors, right? They covered that in relation to Snowden. Amnesia now? News sites are becoming "glorified" PR agencies with a different price list and the art of disguising spam as "substance".]

Microsoft tests an open source electronic voting machine to guard against hacks [Ed: The usual openwashing of NSA back doors on a proprietary OS, Windows.]

Microsoft Open-Sources Project Petridish for Deep-Learning Optimization [Ed: It has become ever so fashionable to openwash one's surveillance code (i.e. slapping it on proprietary GitHub) to make to make it seem "ethical", "transparent" etc.]

Baidu open sources AI to identify people without face masks

ith the growing scare of the deadly coronavirus, companies in China are pushing hard to limit its spread. In one such effort, the country’s leading search engine Baidu has open-sourced an AI model to detect people not wearing face masks. As coronavirus can spread through close contact with an infected person via their coughs, sneezes, or respiratory droplets, China has made it mandatory to wear face masks in several regions. People are instructed to wear masks in public places such as restaurants, shopping malls, and public transport.

[Available now] Raspberry Pi Zero based open source checkra1n jailbreak dongle (Ra1nbox) with screen is in works

Do you have an iPhone? Did you migrate from Android? In case you did, you can probably reminisce the first few weeks. It might have been difficult for you to get along with the whole ecosystem with limited customisation options. Setting the price aside, the main advantage of having an Android device is numerous options to change the default features. In order to gain an elated level of privilege, you can even go through a few steps to root the phone.

MoveIt, the Popular Open Source Platform For Robotic Arms, Releases ROS 2 Version

PickNik Robotics is pleased to announce today the release of a much anticipated new version of MoveIt for use with the industry-advocated ROS 2. PickNik Robotics and its partners Intel, Amazon, Open Robotics, and many worldwide contributors to MoveIt, are excited to see this big step forward in providing next generation open source robotics. MoveIt 2 will enable many compelling advantages over its predecessor, namely faster, more reactive planning through realtime control of robot arms. The new platform version will enable more reliable robot behaviors, based on industry feedback.

Open-Source Neuroscience Hardware Hack Chat

Join us for the Open-Source Neuroscience Hardware Hack Chat this week where we’ll discuss the exploration of the real final frontier, and find out what it takes to invent the tools before you get to use them.

Glasgow Interface Explorer open source multitool for digital electronics

A new project soon to launch via Crowd Supplied is the Glasgow Interface Explorer, offering a highly capable and extremely flexible open source multitool for digital electronics. Created for embedded developers, reverse engineers, digital archivists, electronics hobbyists, and anyone else who wants to communicate with a wide selection of digital devices. The Glasgow Interface Explorer development board has been designed for “maximum reliability and minimum hassle” science creators and can be attached to most devices without the need for additional active or passive components.

ADLINK Industrial-Pi (I-Pi) SMARC Development Kit Features Rockchip PX30 SoC

ADLINK Technology has just announced the Industrial-Pi (I-Pi) SMARC Development Kit to help engineers quickly design prototypes for industrial applications using peripherals and sensors.

Bluetera II open source development board created for motion-based IoT applications

Bluetera II is an open hardware IoT solution powered by 9-axis motion sensors, an MCU with support for BLE 5.0, and an SDK based on Google’s Protocol Buffer technology. The small development board will be soon available to purchase via the Crowd Supply website. Offering a full stack development board using protocol buffers for motion-based IoT applications and has been created to fill the gap for an open source platform that satisfies the following requirements :