opensource

Image: Getty Images/iStockphotoGitHub has put the final touches on its Arctic Code Vault with a nearly 1.5 tonne steel box covered in AI-generated etchings that aim to entice future generations to explore it. GitHub initially deposited its 21 terabyte 20 February 2020 snapshot of all public repositories shortly after the pandemic began, but none of its employees were there to witness or participate in it because of the pandemic. It left that job to local contractors. The mostly QR-encoded snapshot is stored on over…

The left panel shows the chi map of the two sampled catchments. The right upper panel is the Statistical histogram of the river head slope on both sides of the catchment boundary. The right low panel shows the statistical histogram of the local relief of river heads. Credit: Science China Press The erosional landscape evolves as the joint product of both tectonic activity and climate. The morphology of the long profiles of…

Google and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on Wednesday signed a joint research and development pact under which Google will finance production of open-source chips that could be used by academic and small business researchers to build a variety of emerging applications.The majority of newly developed devices require chips to enable their core or 'smart' functionality. But startups usually formed in universities and small businesses typically do not have money to…

Matthew Miller/ZDNETAt the Open Source Summit Europe in Dublin on Tuesday, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF). The open what now, you ask? Is this an attempt to get me to donate money to the Linux Foundation? Nope. OpenWallet is a brand-spanking-new open-source project to support interoperability for a wide range of digital wallets.A few years ago, the phrase digital wallet would also be a mystery to most of us. Digital wallets, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung…

LightbendRepeat after me and V.M. "Vicky" Brasseur, well-known open-source business strategist: "Open source is not a business model." It's a software development model that can be used as part of many business models. That doesn't stop businesses based on open source, however, from blaming opensource for their revenue problems. The latest such is Lightbend, the corporate father of Akka, an important open-source Java middleware program. Lightbend is dropping Akka's open-source Apache license in favor of a non-open…

Breach into Codecov’s system and Log4Systems sending the supply chain tipsy turvy is still fresh in the memories Open-source software compared to proprietary software scores more and for small and medium companies it is the cost savings that count. But one might wonder what a mighty company like Google has to do with open-source software. Google has been at the forefront of contributing toward open-source software development and encouraging its free adoption. It is a known fact that how one security gap can disrupt…

Bitwarden, an open-source password manager for enterprises and consumers, has raised $100 million in a round of funding led by PSG, with participation form Battery Ventures. Founded initially back in 2015, Santa Barbara, California-based Bitwarden operates in a space that includes well-known incumbents such as 1Password, which recently hit a $6.8 billion valuation off the back of a $620 million fundraise, and Lastpass, which was recently spun out as an independent company again two years after…

A comprehensive guide for what it takes to estimate solar panel output using Python and QGISImage by Jack Price-Burns from Unsplash.To figure out how much solar energy a rooftop can produce, we need the following information:Roof slopeRoof azimuth (orientation towards the Sun)Number of solar panels a roof can holdShading factor (the percentage of light that is blocked from shadows)Solar irradiance (how much total sunlight the roof receives)The problem is that determining the first four variables requires a site visit…

Google has introduced a new vulnerability rewards program to pay researchers who find security flaws in its open-source software or in the building blocks that its software is built on. It’ll pay anywhere from $101 to $31,337 for information about bugs in projects like Angular, GoLang, and Fuchsia or for vulnerabilities in the third-party dependencies that are included in those projects’ codebases. While it’s important for Google to fix bugs in its own projects (and in the software that it uses to keep track of changes…

A photorealistic simulator has been developed by a group of reseachers that is capable of creating highly realistic environments that can be used to train autonomous vehicles. The VISTA 2.0 engine has been released in an open-source format by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), allowing other researchers to also teach their autonomous vehicles how to drive on their own in real-world scenarios, without the limitations of a…