OSS and Sharing Leftovers
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Worried about storing your private files with data-hungry tech giants such as Google and Microsoft? Here are three open source alternatives
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The Aeroelastics Research Group has launched an open-source software tool – SHARPy
The tool offers dynamic simulation for everything from wind turbines to solar-powered aircraft.
SHARPy (which stands for Simulation of High-Aspect Ratio aeroplanes in Python) is a dynamic aeroelasticity simulation package. It offers structural, aerodynamic and coupled aeroelastic/flight dynamics analysis, and has particular application for low-speed and very flexible aircraft, and for wind turbines.
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The Iowa caucuses were thrown into disarray as reports surfaced an opaque app used to tabulate the results and report them to Democratic Party officials was reporting only part of the required data. Although the app had been developed to improve efficiency in communicating the final caucus tallies, it ended up causing significant delays. According to security experts, the incident served to highlight the risks of relying on digital systems and the centralization of information, and a lack of transparency regarding these systems.
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After witnessing the debacle in Iowa, campaign decision-makers across the country are wondering just how good is the engineering behind the software they purchase for their campaigns? And for good reason: the stakes couldn’t be higher.
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The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has announced version 2 of the Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM). SAMM is an open-source framework that enables teams and developers to assess, formulate and implement better security strategies that can be integrated into the software development life cycle.
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When open-source software developers are made aware of a specific security vulnerability or bug in their software products, they often publish the vulnerability to the community. If there's a developer who wants to offer a fix, he can build one and publish it as a particular version. If there's no funding to develop an upgrade, an IT professional is still aware of the problem so that he can create a custom workaround for his company's unique system until an updated version of the software becomes available.
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New Delhi [India], Feb 11 (ANI/NewsVoir): While speaking at the inaugural session of the "3rd Open Source Summit 2020" recently in New Delhi, Vivek Banzal, Director (CFA), Bharat Sachar Nigam Limited (BSNL) said that it is a challenge to keep pace with the technology, more so when security of data has to be quite robust.
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"The Government of India has encouraged the adoption of this technology in the Digital India initiative and this has further encouraged the CIO's of enterprises and other government organizations to make a move towards Open source technology. The rise of digital transformation in India has pushed the adoption of open source both by enterprises and government," said Sunil Kumar, Deputy Director-General, National Informatics Centre (NIC), while commenting on the adoption of Open source by the Government to India.
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Additionally, tapping into open source development communities allows them to overcome some of chronic IT skills gaps many agencies continue to face.
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Open source is being used both in civilian and defense agencies. Even though open source code is used for unclassified applications, it does not mean it’s unsecure, assures Michael Kanaan, co-chair of artificial intelligence and machine learning for the U.S. Air Force.
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Searching for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software can be a daunting (and expensive) process, one that requires long hours of research and deep pockets. The most popular RPA tools often provide more than what’s necessary for non-enterprise organizations, with advanced functionality relevant to only the most technically savvy users. Thankfully, there are a number of free and open source RPA tools out there. Some of these solutions are offered by vendors looking to eventually sell you on their enterprise product, and others are maintained and operated by a community of developers looking to democratize robotic process automation.
In this article, we will examine free and open source RPA tools, first by providing a brief overview of what to expect and also with short blurbs of the options currently available in the space. This is the most complete and up-to-date directory on the web.
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The open source software movement has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Many businesses that once considered open source a threat now recognize its value.
On the other hand, in spite of increased enthusiasm among enterprises, consumer interest by and large has not materialized.
With large companies increasingly embracing open source, what does it mean to be a part of the free and open source software, or FOSS, "community"?
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The retail and eCommerce landscapes have changed dramatically over the past decade as customer experience has risen to the forefront of enterprise marketing priorities. Marketers have turned their focus away from price as the key driver of sales to their ability to deliver the most convenient, streamlined and personalized experiences across channels whether online, in-store, or on mobile phones.
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Their solution Pimcore, introduced in 2013, is a free open source software platform for managing digital data and customer experiences for any channel, device, or industry.
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Aims to help channel sell 100% open-source portfolio
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Chef, the leader in DevOps, today announced a new channel program specifically designed to ensure that partners and customers are able to take maximum advantage of Chef’s 100 percent open source business model. The Chef Partner Program (CPP) creates three tiers of partners -- Principal, Senior and Junior -- with the highest benefits and incentives applied to those who drive the strongest results for themselves and their mutual enterprise customers using Chef Enterprise Automation Stack.
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Altran and CableLabs have teamed up on "Project Adrenaline," an open source initiative that aims to help the cable industry build and manage edge networks and smooth the path for apps that can run on them.
And while Adrenaline is initially focused on cable, the broader aim is to apply the resulting open source platform to multiple industries while still staying aligned with Kubernetes.
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Note that this contains only the main deliverables, i.e. the shared libraries and executables. Unit tests and the like are not converted apart from a few sample tests.
It was mentioned in an earlier blog post that platform abstraction layers are the trickiest ones to build. This turns out to be the case here also. LO has at least three such frameworks (depending on how you count them). SAL is the very basic layer, UNO is a component model used to, for example, expose functionality to Java. Finally VCL is the GUI toolkit abstraction layer. Now that we have the GUI toolkit and its GTK plugin built we can build a VCL sample application and launch it. It looks like this:
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A security update has been released for the popular open source text editor TinyMCE after a researcher discovered a a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability impacting three of its plugins.
Should You Opt For An Open-Source LMS [Ed: The proprietary software LMS vendors badmouthing Free software as if that means "no support" (which is exactly the opposite of what's true, the support of the lifeline of the developers)]
In the modern world, organizations are increasingly using learning management systems (LMS) for corporate training. However, with the availability of both open-source LMS and commercial LMS, choosing the more appropriate one for your organization can be challenging.
Although leading open-source industry pioneers such as Moodle has dominated eLearning over the past few years, many organizations still prefer proprietary LMS over open-source LMS. In this article, we have assessed both these options and jotted down the factors you must consider before making a decision.
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The companies include: EPAM Systems, Inc., a product development, digital platform engineering, and digital and product design agency; NearForm, an open source solutions design and delivery company; and CloudBees, a provider of DevOps solutions.
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Finos (Fintech Open Source Foundation), a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards, and collaborative software development practices in financial services, today announces the addition of three established fintechs to its already growing membership roster of prestigious financial institutions, technology companies and global consultancies.
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Big cloud vendors have preyed upon open source R&D by providing open source software (OSS) software as-a-service to edge out small competitors. Combine that with the platform benefits of economies of scale and greater opportunities for integration… and you can see how the big cloud providers can drown open source startups.
That said, companies eclipsing growth-stage and legacy companies looking to store mission-critical data in the cloud are becoming wary of big vendors not investing in their R&D.
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Reduced to its essence, free and open source software is defining a set of freedoms, encoded into software licences.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) maintains an open source definition and a list of compatible licences, with the double goal of guaranteeing those essential freedoms and rights… and facilitating adoption by limiting licence proliferation.
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The future of Australia’s energy mix has spawned innumerable heated arguments over how to balance secure electricity supply with economic and environmental needs, prompting energy consultants ITP to launch an open source modelling tool to settle arguments and provide clarity.
Inspired by similar open source models in Europe and North America, ITP launched the openCEM model as a free, transparent tool to cut through the complexity of Australia’s energy mix and how it can securely transition away from carbon.
“ITP felt, as many have felt, that public discussions around renewables were fraught with many assumptions and made with few facts and little expertise,” ITP strategy group manager Oliver Woldring said.
[..]
Once openCEM is being used widely by policy makers and investors across Australia, ITP and ThoughtWorks aims to engage other markets across APAC and further afield, about creating tools to model uptakes of renewables into the grids of other countries.
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A popular self-driving car dataset for training machine-learning systems – one that’s used by thousands of students to build an open-source self-driving car – contains critical errors and omissions, including missing labels for hundreds of images of bicyclists and pedestrians.
Machine learning models are only as good as the data on which they’re trained. But when researchers at Roboflow, a firm that writes boilerplate computer vision code, hand-checked the 15,000 images in Udacity Dataset 2, they found problems with 4,986 – that’s 33% – of those images.
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A Massachusetts-based partnership aims to create a common workplace for healthcare providers and researchers using mHealth sensors in wearables and other devices.
The Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR), launched last September by Nextbridge Health, Shimmer Research and Dr. Vincent van Hees, announced that it is now “actively soliciting” open-source software and datasets from wearable sensors and other connected health technologies. The group wants to create a platform from which researchers and care providers can share digital health source codes and algorithms.
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Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology (IT), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) have announced that they have developed an innovative approach to empower communities around the world through development of a special video program.
According to a joint statement from Monash, the Red Cross and Red Crescent some of the world’s most isolated and remote communities will now have the ability to share their stories and raise public awareness of the local issues they’re facing “through a unique open-source video program developed by Monash”.
| Openwashing Leftovers
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In the cryptocurrency world, very few people pay for something they can get for free otherwise. Casa, a Bitcoin startup focusing on hardware network node solutions, is open-sourcing its project entirely.
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Open source availability enables existing InterSystems partners and customers, as well as other organizations and academics, to capitalize on the unique and unbiased bottom-up approach that delivers deeper insights with NLP provided by InterSystems iKnow.
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Becoming a DSP requires modernizing operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS). CSPs must work closely with independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) to move current OSS/BSS solutions to the cloud-native, common, open-software technology base of the future.
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By releasing this open source, TTC Foundation expects to increase the interest on blockchain among the developer community. The source code, now accessible by the public, will empower the community to develop and launch high quality DeFi services - equivalent of the internet banking services on blockchain - with little to no efforts, It will provide more options to cryptocurrency holders to benefit from daily financial services such as staking rewards and collateralized debt.
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Writing software to run efficiently on today’s heterogeneous compute architectures is an ongoing challenge made increasingly difficult by the growing number of processor and accelerator choices. One effort to help mitigate the challenge is the high level programming model – SYCL – developed by the Khronos industry consortium. SYCL builds on OpenCL (Open Computing Language) and “enables code for heterogeneous processors to be written in a single-source style using completely standard C++.”
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Although 3D computer vision is an increasingly important part of the computer vision research field, studies on 3D in deep learning have been limited by a lack of available tools and resources that can deal with the complexities involved in applying rich 3D data on neural networks. In a bid to simplify 3D deep learning and improve processing performance and efficiency, Facebook recently introduced an open-source framework for 3D computer vision. PyTorch3D is an efficient and reusable 3D computer vision library based on PyTorch that outperforms existing tools in many aspects of 3D modeling, rendering and other processing operations.
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While working at Zillow Group, I became part of implementing Kong in the Trulia DevOps group. I had never heard of Kong, but when my manager presented the project to me, I immediately said yes. Since it was a huge undertaking from which I wanted to retain my learnings, I decided to create a diary of my experience.
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iRODS is free open source software for data virtualization, data discovery, workflow automation, and secure collaboration used by research and business organizations around the globe. iRODS allows users to catalog all of their data and metadata into a unified namespace, and then automate their data management through an integrated rules engine.
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Search giant Baidu has released an open-source tool to detect whether individuals in crowds are wearing face masks, as cities around the country impose rules requiring use of such protection in public spaces.
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In response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak, China tech giant Baidu has open-sourced its RNA (Ribonucleic acid) prediction algorithm LinearFold. The tool can significantly accelerate the prediction time of a virus’s RNA secondary structure, affording frontline researchers an opportunity to better understand the virus and develop targeting vaccines in a time of crisis. Baidu’s AI scientists told Synced that they have already applied LinearFold to the 2019-nCoV, reducing prediction time from 55 minutes to 27 seconds.
Knowledge of RNA secondary structures has become essential for researchers seeking to model RNA structures and gain insight into related functional mechanisms. However, current algorithms borrowed from computational linguistics and based on dynamic programming face a challenge: increases in RNA length cause their runtimes to scale in a cubic manner. This can seriously slow such algorithms when facing long RNA sequences and limit their use in genome-wide applications.
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The partnership brings together best-in-class sUAS hardware with a secure, scalable, open source, operating system, Auterion OS. Auterion OS is currently employed on an ecosystem of sUAS from small multi-rotors to hybrid VTOL Group 2 air vehicles.
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Security/Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering
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This hackathon has grown to become one of the largest and most well-regarded in the country, with attendees from around the country traveling to Illinois to test and build their hacking skills.
According to Opensource.com, open-source software is “software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify and enhance,” thereby allowing participants to focus on open exchange and collaboration during the one-of-a-kind event.
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Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has detected that hacking group Outlaw has been updating its toolkit for stealing enterprises’ data for nearly half a year at this point.
Outlaw — who had ostensibly been silent since last June — became active again in December, with upgrades on their kits’ capabilities, which now target more systems, according to an analysis from Trend Micro published on Feb. 10. The kits in question are designed to steal data from the automotive and finance industries.
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Last month, SpaceX became the operator of the world’s largest active satellite constellation. As of the end of January, the company had 242 satellites orbiting the planet with plans to launch 42,000 over the next decade. This is part of its ambitious project to provide internet access across the globe. The race to put satellites in space is on, with Amazon, U.K.-based OneWeb and other companies chomping at the bit to place thousands of satellites in orbit in the coming months.
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Security researchers are warning that 12,000 cloud automation servers around the world could be hijacked to launch denial of service (DoS) attacks.
| IBM and Red Hat Leftovers
IBM Watson And The Value Of Open [Ed: Well, Watson is proprietary software. This is cheap, low-grade openwashing. See authors here. Forbes apparently takes IBM money for marketing/propaganda.]
Not so long ago, back in 2011, IBM’s artificial intelligence technology (later packaged and sold as Watson) triumphed in the game of Jeopardy. Watson played against the two most successful contestants ever to appear on the show. This victory reflected the result of an enormous amount of work done by IBM and others to mine human language for the semantic meaning of words, and allow a machine to answer Jeopardy questions that would have been impossible for any computer just a few years earlier.
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Edge computing devices are proliferating at an astonishing rate, jumping from about 15 billion devices today to about 55 billion by 2022, according to Rob High, VP and CTO of IBM Watson.
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Crunchy Data, the leading provider of trusted open source PostgreSQL technology and support, is pleased to announce that Crunchy PostgreSQL for Kubernetes 4.2 has achieved the "auto pilot" capability level as part of Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification. The "auto pilot" capability level designates the highest level of automation associated with Operator technologies, including PostgreSQL cluster self-healing after a failover event and advanced high-availability configurations for workloads sensitive to transaction loss.
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The Command Line Heroes podcast is back, and this season it covers the machines that run all the programming languages I covered last season. As the podcast staff puts it:
"This season, we'll look at what happens when idealistic teams come together to build visionary machines. Machines made with leaps of faith and a lot of hard, often unrecognized, work in basements and stifling cubicles. Machines that brought teams together and changed us as a society in ways we could only dream of."
This first episode looks at the non-fiction book (and engineering classic), The Soul of a New Machine, to look at a critical moment in computing history. It covers the transition from large, hulking mainframes to the intermediate step of the minicomputer, which will eventually lead us to the PC revolution that we're still living in the wake of.
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I try to use the Selinux MLS with Fedora 31 and I wrote on my last article about Fedora 31 : Can be better? part 005.After relabeling the files and start the environment I get multiple errors and I ask an answer at fedoraproject lists: This is an example of the problem of implementing MLS in Fedora and can be remedied because MLS Selinux is old in implementing Selinux.
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The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of a lower court decision: Oracle v. Google. Red Hat, one of the leaders of the open source community, has emphasized to the USSC that software interfaces should not become subject to copyright protection and are not copyrightable by design. Read the complete amicus brief filed by Red Hat and IBM.
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As we state clearly in the opening statement of our brief, Red Hat — as a leader in the open source community — emphasised to the USSC the critical importance of maintaining the long-standing view that software interfaces should not be subject to copyright protection.
Because computer programs achieve compatibility and interoperability with each other through specifically defined interfaces, the concern is that if copyright protection were to exist in such interfaces, the open source community could face significant barriers in the creation and implementation of new software modules to replace existing modules. This consequence may chill the innovation that is generated by open source software community development.
Our brief also recognises that computer interfaces being uncopyrightable does not jeopardise copyright protection in software programs generally. Red Hat fully supports software programmers developing value and differentiating themselves in the marketplace via implementation code. In fact, the more freely that computer interfaces are available, the more of a market may exist for particular implementations using an existing computer interface.
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