Software

  • goSDL is “is a web application tool that serves as a self-service entry point for following a Security Development Lifecycle checklist in a software development project.” Slack has released goSDL under an MIT license. Slack is known for churning out large amounts of code quickly with a relatively small developer team, and they had a hard […]

  • ExpressVPN has released leak testing tools under an open source license. They were developed by the company’s Privacy Research Lab and have been released under an MIT license. The tools were build for two reasons: To provide robust, automated regression testing of ExpressVPN applications To facilitate leak testing investigations to further strengthen those applications The […]

  • Google has released DeepVariant as open source. From the announcement: Today, we announce the open source release of DeepVariant, a deep learning technology to reconstruct the true genome sequence from HTS sequencer data with significantly greater accuracy than previous classical methods. This work is the product of more than two years of research by the Google Brain […]

  • Mozilla has announced new funding via their Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program to support important open source projects. Ushahidi was the biggest benefactor of this program, receiving $194,000. Ushahidi is a platform for “crowdsourcing, monitoring, visualizing, and responding to reports from people caught up in political turmoil or subject to governmental or vigilante abuse.” […]

  • Yahoo has announced the release of Vespa, a big data processing and service engine. This engine is a critical component of the Yahoo search engine, and they hope that by making this open source more developers will be able to “build applications that can compute responses to user requests, over large datasets, at real time […]

  • GitHub has published the results of their 2017 open source survey that highlights many of the challenges the open source industry is currently facing. They “collected responses from 5,500 randomly sampled respondents sourced from over 3,800 open source repositories on GitHub.com, and over 500 responses from a non-random sample of communities that work on other […]

  • IBM, Google, and Lyft have worked together to produce Istio, an open source microservices platform built for developers. The release of this project is part of an effort from these three companies to develop better software to connect, secure, manage, and monitor microservices platforms between platforms, sources, and vendors. From the announcement: We continue to […]

  • Toyota has announced that the infotainment system in their new Camry sedans to be sold in the US will run Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).  Toyota has been working on this platform along with 10 other automakers because it makes it much easier to customize infotainment systems that have well-developed features. The Camry models that run […]

  • After 4 years of research, Sprint has released C3PO, an open source platform to improve NFV/SDN efficiency. From the announcement: C3PO is an open source NFV- and SDN-based mobile core reference solution designed to significantly improve performance of the network core by providing a streamlined, high-performance data plane for the packet core, tightly coupled to […]

  • Teradata has released Kylo, a platform for managing data lakes, under the Apache 2.0 license. Kylo evolved from software the company developed over eight years, and it’s built upon Apache Hadoop, Spark, and NiFi. The goal with Kylo is to reduce the amount of time and expertise it takes to build data lakes by simplifying […]

  • The Java “Apache Commons Collections Deserialization Vulnerability” CVE 2015-6420 was first identified in 2015, but it received very little attention in the months after it was announced. Since then, it has been the source of a handful of high profile attacks, including the 2016 ransomware attacks on Baltimore’s Union Memorial Hospital and the San Francisco Municipal network. […]

  • Ladar Levinson received considerable attention in 2013 when he was forced to shut down Lavabit, the email service he provides, as a result of actions from the US federal government related to the email account of Edward Snowden. Instead of being forced to implement back-door that could potentially harm all of the company’s users, Levinson […]

  • Google is preparing for the 13th annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and they are now accepting applications for open source organizations to get involved. In this program, students spend 3 months working under the guidance of mentors to expand and improve upon open source software. Last year, the program had 178 open source organizations […]

  • Google has released Draco, an open source compression library to improve the storage and transmission of 3D graphics. From the announcement: Draco can be used to compress meshes and point-cloud data. It also supports compressing points, connectivity information, texture coordinates, color information, normals and any other generic attributes associated with geometry. With Draco, applications using 3D graphics […]

  • D-wave is a company that specializes in quantum computing systems. The complex nature of quantum computing has limited the software field primarily to individuals who have expertise in particle physics, D-wave looks to reduce the barrier to creating software that uses quantum processing with the release of qbsolv: software that greatly simplifies the process of […]

  • The Swedish National Survey is leading an effort to track land ownership in their country using a public blockchain; testing for this is set to begin in March 2017. At this time, the system will be populated with test data and made public, and the public is invited to test out the system from a […]

  • Walmart has released Electrode as open source. Electrode is a React-based application the company uses to power Walmart.com. From the project about page: Electrode is a platform for building universal React/Node.js applications with a standardized structure, best practices, and modern technologies baked in. Electrode focuses on performance, component reusability, and simple deployment to multiple cloud […]

  • Random Articles from the OST Archives

    • The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced a partnership with the Linux Foundation to launch the Academy Software Foundation, and open source foundation for the motion picture and media industries. Founding members include companies both the technology and the media space including Cusco, Animal Logic, Blue Sky Studios, Cisco, Disney, Google, and […]

    • Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate for Linux 4.0. Like most releases, the release itself is relatively minor and only includes a handful of major changes. It is a slightly smaller update than the last few, coming in at about 9,000 non-merge commits. The change to 4.0 is merely an attempt to reduce […]

    • Gngr is a web browser built from scratch to protect the privacy of its users. The default settings of the browser put privacy at the top of the list by disabling cookies, JavaScript, HTTP referring support, and third-party frames. The project announced they would begin open sourcing code after the initial release, and now some […]

    • Werner Koch is the man behind one of the most popular open source email encryption toosl GnuPG (GPG). He recently announced he would need to cease development on the project due to a severe lack of funds. He nearly gave up on the project in 2013, but stayed involved after seeing the need for his […]