Heartbleed, a bug in OpenSSL, was an extraordinary bug in both its technological and societal impact because it put an incredibly large number of people at risk and spurred a unique approach to cyber-security. It was the first of its kind to receive its own brand and logo, but that was not the only reason […]
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Bioware has released Orbit, the first open source project released in the company’s history. Orbit is “a modern Java framework that makes it easier to build and maintain distributed, secure, and scalable online services. It is inspired by a variety of existing frameworks and brings some exciting new things to the table.” The company seeks […]
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Jay is a JavaScript wallet for the cryptocurrency NXT that has been released as open source. It consists of two elements, a server that communicates with the NXT network and a client that runs in any web browse and gives the user access to all of the currency’s capabilities. The client works in a way […]
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The Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) has had a number of controversies during heated debates over the development of the Kernel. Most recently, Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, wrote an article where he accused Linus Torvalds of encouraging personal attacks on him. The resolution code was written by Greg Kroah-Hartman and was signed off […]
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Ubuntu has officially made the switch to systemd, as a replacement for upstart, the distribution’s own init program. The change is being incorporated into the latest beta version and won’t be added to long-term-support until sometime next year. The decision was reluctantly made by Canonical after Debian, the popular Linux distro on which Ubuntu is […]
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Many people have already commented on the benefits and problems of Bitcoin as a currency, but perhaps the most valuable aspect has been explored only minimally. The blockchain is at the core of Bitcoin and serves as a distributed ledger of all transactions that can validate the authenticity of each individual Bitcoin without relying on […]
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GitLab specializes in revision control systems and offers revision control SaaS as well as a Community Edition of their software which is open source and can be run on private servers. The ability to run the software on private servers makes it much easier for a company to configure their network and other tools to […]
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Steam now has more than 1,000 games that are available for Linux (1,002 to be exact). This is a major development considering there were less than 500 games for Linux a year ago; this trend demonstrates the rapid expansion of gaming on Linux which is bringing growing monetary investments and expanding the user base for […]
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SUSE has decided to follow Red Hat into Ceph: an object data storage platform. Ceph was originally developed by the company InkScape, but the company was purchased by Red Hat in 2014, and its primary features are cache tiering, copy-on-write cloning, thin provisioning, and erasure coding. This development appeals primarily to people looking to build […]
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The biggest benefit of open source can also be its greatest challenge. While the ability to modify, reuse, and redistribute software freely helps open source innovate at an extreme pace, it also puts the responsibility of it’s improvement in the hands of the users. This means that users of open source have a responsibility to […]
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The ability to add messages to payments is an extremely useful function, but one that has been mostly lacking in the Bitcoin protocol. Now, CoinSpark has released an open source messaging protocol for Bitcoin in which only the sender and receiver can view the message. It is a method of coloring the Bitcoin in a […]
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Free and open source alternatives to proprietary platforms have been improving vastly in recent years, and they offer alternatives to proprietary technology that is being forced into choke points that destroy privacy, limit freedom, and inhibit culture and commerce. If we want to live in a society where technology is a force for freedom, then […]
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Walmart has already seen measurable benefits from investing money and developer time in the Node.js community. Now, the company is focusing on hapi, a framework for building applications and services. The company has found that investng time and money in open source communities like this has benefited them immensely by making it easier to find […]
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Blockly is a visual programming language that allows people to build apps using a drag and drop format where elements are combined to produce an application. It was originally launched by Google and was called the App Inventor, but when the company abandoned it they handed the code over to MIT to continue the work […]
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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 […]
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3D Robotics, the largest US-based drone manufacturer, announced the launch of their open source flight control app named Tower. In addition to providing plenty of beneficial methods for communicating with drones, it also allows developers to build new tools and features without needing to reinvent the wheel. The app includes the ability to set up […]
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Node.js is a popular server-side JavaScript framework that focuses on providing communication tools that are robust and easy to use. It was launched by Ryan Dahl, a Joyent employee, and has been led by the company ever since. Recently, members of the community have had issue with how the project release cycle has been managed; […]
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Microsoft’s long reign at the top of the browser market with Internet Explorer came to an end last summer when Chrome surpassed it in overall desktop and mobile usage. It seems the combination of lack of IE on mobile devices and the fact that it is the only remaining browser that is proprietary from end-to-end […]
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The complexity of embedded computers has changed dramatically in recent years, and open source technologies have offered increasingly powerful and adaptable solutions. Specifically, many are turning to Linux for building embedded devices, but its diversity in distributions sometimes makes supporting the necessary functions a challenge. Yocto was started by a group of companies in 2010 […]
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Google recently made headlines when the company announced that Youtube would no longer use flash for streaming videos. Flash is proprietary software, owned by Adobe, and has been the target of considerable criticism from the free software movement since one of its primary purposes is to restrict the abilities of the user. You might expect […]
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OST Original
The Proprietary Failure to Protect Privacy
All social interaction requires some degree of trust. This trust has become much harder to understand in the Information Age as we interact with a wide variety of online services daily, many of them requiring the transfer of private information. Businesses, governments, citizen groups and many other organizations need a method for ensuring their private […]
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Declining citizen participation in governance and political systems that are incapable of keeping up with the complexity of modern society is opening an innovation gap that needs to be filled in order to bring our systems of governance into the 21st century. DemocracyOS is a new project aimed at improving the interacting between citizens and […]
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Google has released Walt, a toolset for measuring touch and audio latency on mobile devices, as open source. Previous solutions to measure device latency have mostly focused on providing a single, round-trip number that shows overall latency by either detecting how long audio took to go from the microphone to the speaker, or how long […]
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