Openness: Software Defined Drones, Energy, Open Data, Open Access and Open Hardware

• Software Defined Drones and the Path to Standardization and Scale in the Drone Industry

  Sartori is the co-founder of Auterion – they’re the Red Hat of the drone industry, serving as a distributor and enabler for open source software for drones. He’s a proponent of open source, and a believer that open source software is the key to scalability in the drone industry. There’s data and history to support the idea. As drone manufacturing giant DJI is often compared to Apple, open source drones are frequently compared to Android – and Sartori points out that Android is based on open source Linux, and as more than 87 percent of phones are now Android, that makes it the most used software in the world.

• ITP Renewables releases free open-source modelling platform for the energy transition

  ITP Renewables has released Version 1 of open-CEM, a free of charge open source modelling tool for the National Electricity Market (NEM). The tool can be used by policy makers, project developers, investors and the public to run scenarios of the development of the NEM out to 2050. The project’s aim is to provide a transparent and well-informed analysis of technology and policy options for the NEM as Australia proceeds through the energy transition. Open-CEM was developed in conjunction the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the Energy Transition Hub at the University of Melbourne, software developers ThoughtWorks and the US Strategy Energy Analysis Center of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

• 10 NLP Open-Source Datasets To Start Your First NLP Project

  There has been significant growth in natural language processing (NLP) over the last few years. The demand for advanced text recognition, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, machine-to-human communication has led to the rise of several innovations. According to industry estimates, the global NLP market will reach a market value of US$ 28.6 billion in 2026 and is expected to witness CAGR of 11.71% across the forecast period through 2018 to 2026.

• Arcadia Fund grant to support open-source publishing across UC campuses

  The Educopia Institute and California Digital Library, or CDL, received a $2.2 million grant in August in support of the Next Generation Library Publishing project, or Next Gen. The grant was bestowed by the Arcadia Fund, a charity that supports environmental, cultural heritage and open-access projects. The Next Gen project is said to enhance the UC system’s open-access publishing infrastructure by providing noncommercial tools that support the dissemination of knowledge, according to a CDL press release.

• OpenLeg – The Open Source Robot Leg

  There’s an old saying about standing on the shoulders of giants, but how about doing so with an open source leg? Well, your robots might do so at least, thanks to OpenLeg, a new open source project for building robot legs. Created by [Joey Byrnes], this started out as a senior project for a course at the University of Illinois. The idea is to create a robot leg that others can use to build four-legged robots that can amble around the neighborhood, much like those built by Boston Dynamics.

• New microscopes unravel the mysteries of brain organization

  The secret of capturing exquisite brain images with a new generation of custom-built microscopes is revealed today in Nature Methods. The new microscopes, known as mesoSPIMs, can image the minute detail of brain tissue down to individual neurons that are five times thinner than a human hair, and can uncover the 3D anatomy of entire small organs, faster than ever before. MesoSPIMs provide new insights into brain and spinal cord organization for researchers working to restore movement after paralysis or to investigate neuronal networks involved in cognition, pleasure, or drug addiction.

• New open-source microscope may help paralysis patients

  Scientists have developed a new generation of custom-built microscopes that significantly improve brain tissue imaging, an advance that could help find better treatment for patients with paralysis. The microscopes, known as mesoSPIMs—short for 'mesoscale selective plane-illumination microscopes'—can image brain tissues down to the minute details of individual neurons which are five times thinner than a human hair, the study noted. The researchers added that they can uncover the 3D anatomy of entire small organs, faster than ever before using the new microscope.

Security Leftovers

• Falco founder: Kubernetes security has to do better than “don’t worry – OH MY GOD”

  It’s almost a year since Sysdig’s behavioral activity monitoring tool Falco entered the sandbox of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). We talked to the company’s new chief open source advocate Kris Nova and co-founder Loris Degioanni to check in about the project’s progress and talk about the state of Kubernetes security and open source licensing in general. Falco was first introduced to the public back in May 2016. It’s no secret that security wasn’t exactly a top priority when Kubernetes was developed, so Falco was set up to tackle some of the challenges the orchestrator introduced to the modern infrastructure stack. [...] Moving the project into the CNCF in October 2018 was the logical next step for Degioanni. “In order to be cloud-native and to actually be placed as a part of the stack of the next generation of infrastructures, you want to be part of the CNCF nowadays.” But the foundation has strict rules on what projects must do to make it to the next stage, so the first months in the sandbox were mostly spent setting up processes and work on Falco’s own infrastructure. With Nova, who spent quite some time on the Kubernetes project, now on board, this trajectory is likely to continue.

• Australian not-for-profit's encryption solution to privacy breaches

  One of the main aspects of addressing or curing the privacy breach epidemic is to gain back control and management over personal data. Where we see the aspect of giving back consumer some control, all of the control, and the accountability for their personal data that's stored on digital space, and what we developed is a set of tools that allows an entire economy of consumers, businesses and marketers to interact in harmony and in a way move the world to a more privacy aware interaction.

• Open source breach and attack simulation tool Infection Monkey gets new features

  Guardicore, a leader in internal data center and cloud security, unveiled new capabilities for its Infection Monkey that make it the industry’s first Zero Trust assessment tool.

• Patch now: 1,300 Harbor cloud registries open to attack [Ed: What they mean by “open to attack” is “needs patching”. Typical ZDNet.]

OSS Leftovers

• State of DevOps 2019 Survey, Sponsored by CloudBees, Shows Higher Percentage of Top-performing DevOps Teams Use Open Source Software

  CloudBees, the enterprise DevOps leader powering the continuous economy, highlighted recent findings in the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. The survey was conducted by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), a pioneer in helping organizations achieve high DevOps and organizational performance with data-driven insights, and Google Cloud, and sponsored by CloudBees and others. The results showed that a higher percentage of top performing teams in enterprise organizations are using open source software. Additionally, the proportion of Elite performers (highest performing teams) nearly tripled from last year, showing that DevOps capabilities are driving performance.

• The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

  When you buy a product like Philips Hue’s smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that’s true for those who directly author a product’s software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through “open-source” projects on sites like GitHub and GitLab. Often these developers are happy to work for free. Writing open-source software allows them to sharpen their skills, gain perspectives from the community, or simply help the industry by making innovations available at no cost. According to Google, which maintains hundreds of open-source projects, open source “enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems.”

• Obsidian Systems’ end-to-end coverage of Open Source Week 2019

  Leading South African open source firm and provider of OS technology and services Obsidian Systems has confirmed its Diamond Sponsorship of the acclaimed and much-anticipated Open Source Week, managed by the organisers of PyConZA, LinuxConfZA and PostgresConfZA tracks.

• npm, Inc. Announces Leadership Change

  npm, Inc., the open source JavaScript developer tools provider and operator of the world's largest software registry, today announced its CEO, Bryan Bogensberger , has resigned effective immediately to pursue new opportunities. npm's Board of directors have commenced a search for a new CEO. The company's leadership will be managed collaboratively by a team comprised of senior npm executives.

• What does upstream and downstream development even mean?

  If you've ever dealt with (in any shape or form) open source software, chances are pretty good you've heard the terms upstream and downstream. These terms are actually more important to open source development than you might think. But what do they even mean? I'm going to explain it to you.

• Being open about open source

  IMS MAXIMS broke new ground in 2014 when it made the code for its big hospital IT systems open source.

• Sharing Is Caring, Says Firm That Made Its Tech Open-Source

  Usually when law firms develop legal technology, either it’s to make a profit or it’s free to further the firm’s branding as a legal expert in the platform’s practice area. But Travers Smith bucked that trend when it announced last week that it was releasing its email management system MatMail as open-source software.

• Inspur Open-Sources TF2, a Full-Stack FPGA-Based Deep Learning Inference Engine

  Inspur has announced the open-source release of TF2, an FPGA-based efficient AI computing framework. The inference engine of this framework employs the world's first DNN shift computing technology, combined with a number of the latest optimization techniques, to achieve FPGA-based high-performance low-latency deployment of universal deep learning models. T

• Developer pulls critical code from tech company after ICE contract revealed

  On Thursday, software engineer Seth Vargo pulled his open source “Chef Sugar” project from Github, as well as the Ruby package library, RubyGems. Vargo made the decision to pull the code, which had millions of downloads, after learning that Chef, a company that provides an “automation platform” for infrastructure management, had a software contract with ICE.

• Microsoft poses threat to Germany's digital sovereignty, warns study

  Germany's ministry of the interior asked management consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PwC, to produce a "Strategic market analysis on reducing dependence on single software providers". In the 34-page document released yesterday, researchers conclude that "at all levels" the German government is "strongly dependent" on very few software providers. And that is particularly true for Microsoft, whose Office and Windows programs are running on 96% of public officials' computers. This dependence results in "pressure points in the federal government, that work in opposition to the government's [stated] strategic IT goals," the report notes. Concerns about information security at Microsoft could "endanger the country's digital sovereignty".

• Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

  DevOps darling Chef had a nightmare Thursday after it emerged the software biz had inked a deal with US immigration, which sparked protest and a baffling counter-response. Here's how it went down. Earlier this week, Chef, an app configuration specialist, was publicly called out for selling $95,000 (£75,000) of licenses to Uncle Sam's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the controversial agency best known for its recent hits I Separated Asylum-Seeking Families At The Border and What's A Concentration Camp. The one-year software supply deal, brokered by a reseller, kicked off in August. Open-source programmer and DevOps guru Seth Vargo, deeply unhappy with this arrangement, yanked offline some of his Ruby Gems – software packages for Ruby devs – that made Ruby-based Chef a lot easier to use. In particular, he took down the popular and useful Chef-Sugar, which over the years has racked up more than 20 million downloads.

• Thwarting Digital Ad Fraud at Scale: An Open Source Experiment with Anomaly Detection

  To achieve the requisite capabilities while keeping the experimental solution cost-effective for practical usage, our test system used an architecture comprised of open source Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, and our Anomaly Detection application. Beyond the performance, scalability, and affordably Kafka and Cassandra provide, both Open-source data technologies also offer a particularly high degree of compatibility and pair well together.

• A Developer Deletes His Code to Protest Its Use by ICE

  Computer server management software is usually pretty boring. But when that software is sold to a federal agency that separates families and detains children, even esoteric technology can become the center of controversy. On Monday, activist Shanley Kane highlighted a contract between Seattle-based software company Chef and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Chef develops and sells open source software for configuring servers and cites Alaska Airlines, Google, Facebook, and Capital One as customers. The ICE contract created a minor stir on Twitter, but by Thursday morning, Chef hadn’t made a public statement about the controversy. Discouraged by the company’s silence, former Chef employee Seth Vargo removed several Chef-related open source tools that he had hosted on two code repositories. They included Sugar, a tool designed to make it easier to work with Chef’s software that’s widely used by Chef customers, though it’s not clear if ICE uses it. "I have removed my code from the Chef ecosystem," Vargo wrote on the code hosting site GitHub. "I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source [code] from being used for evil."

• Open-source control system alternatives

  Though the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) continues to receive the lions share of coverage as defining “the” open system, it is, in fact, not the only approach or option for the application of open technologies for the control domain. OPAF is somewhat constrained on how open they can be because they have backwards compatibility as a starting point, which to some extent limits them to using traditional and “less open” (consortia-sponsored) protocols such as OPC, FieldComm, Profibus, etc. to ensure compatibility and vendor support. They’re also working on how to convert all their existing applications and IP to the new virtual environment. [...] Building on the latent momentum for small, low-cost microcontrollers, Hilscher has introduced its Industrial Raspberry Pi 3 using Node-Red as the development/integration environment and Docker containers to design and connect with the rest of the world. Node-RED is a Java-script programming tool for connecting hardware devices, APIs and online services by providing a browser-based flow editor that makes it easy to virtually “wire” together flows that can be then deployed to the runtime in a single click.