The GVP: a new old internet tool for global democracy

Together with Democracy without Borders, the World Parliament Experiment has been working on a Global Voting Platform (GVP).

The GVP is an internet based tool for promoting global democracy which will be scalable from small numbers of participants to mass use at the global level. In a structured way it allows for creating initiatives, debating them and voting on them, with the option to delegate votes. The GVP is the successor to an internet tool implemented in the year 2000, and so builds on real-world experience.

In 2019, the programming of the GVP progressed to a stage that allowed for beta testing. A first phase with a focus on the main mechanisms was successfully completed identifying only minor bugs, and a second phase is still ongoing prior to the official launch.

In 2020, we plan to further develop the GVP under the motto generating political impact. These will be our next steps:

The GVP was used to support the World Parliament Experiments other project in 2019: the Global Democracy Lab (GDL). The GDL 2019 was a week-long leadership course for global democracy activists that took place from 21-25 October in Berlin. Participants from six countries gave positive feedback and shared good ideas for improving the format. The course was aimed at activists interested in using modern concepts of leadership, introduced by professional coaches, to be more effective in supporting the mission of Democracy without Borders.

During the lab, the GVP served as a learning and organizing tool for participants, and catalysed a discussion on how steps towards global democracy could be made workable.

We are planning a follow-up workshop on internet and democracy in April or May 2020 where we will invite experts to discuss challenges to internet governance, for example national internet shutdowns, and how free internet access and democracy-friendly internet usage can be supported by open source software, good data protection and data security, and potentially blockchain technology for decentralization and transparency. We also hope to generate ideas for using the GVP to promote global democracy, and what requirements it must meet to fulfil this purpose.

Also in 2020, there will be a second GDL that will integrate the results of the previous workshop with further ideas and concepts, such as the establishment of a GDL fellowship for committed and capable global democracy activists. We intend to link GDL and GVP more closely by using the GVP as the organizational platform for such a fellowship, preparing the next GDL event on the GVP, and feeding GDL content on future initiatives into the GVP for debate.

If this second GDL delivers good and measurable results for Democracy Without Borders, we will propose making the GDL a permanent DWB project a Global Democracy Academy.

To join our mailing list or to get involved in the above projects, please write to team@world-parliament.org. There are numerous options for creative contributions, and we look forward to hearing from you.

See the rest here:
Pilot projects for a Global Voting Platform and a Global Democracy Lab - Democracy Without Borders

Open source software has long been the powerhouse behind the development of the internet, not least LAMP configuration servers that run on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

While there is a variety of free software programs out there, many are proprietary, meaning that the development company owns the code. With open source software, anyone can add to, edit, and adapt the source code as they see fit.

This is one of the key strengths of open source software, because not only does it invite close scrutiny from a wide range of parties with different interests and skill sets, it also invites wide ranging collaboration.

Because of this, many open source projects have dedicated communities behind them, with developers adding to and evolving features along new coding lines, directions, and standards.

Of course, where open source projects become particularly big their communities can end up splitting into different groups working in different directions, a process known as forking. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Linux operating system, which now comes in many flavors or distros.

Either way, despite the power of proprietary software programs, platforms, and operating systems, open source software remain key in the modern world. Even better, open source can offer users free alternatives to paid-for programs without necessarily sacrificing on features, and you can even customize the software to suit you.

Here then is the best in open source software by type, to show some of the range of open source software opportunities.

There's no need to pay for Office with this open source alternative

Full feature range

Fully compatible with MS files

Lots of templates

Not cloud-based

LibreOffice is an office software suite that is available for Windows, Mac, or Linux, offering documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases.

While Microsoft Office remains the most popular application for office use, it's pricing model hasn't always been the most accessible. Worse still is that alternative office suites such as Open Office can struggle to preserve formatting from Microsoft files, and others such as Google's G Suite just isn't so feature-rich.

LibreOffice manages to counter both frustrations by being not only fully compatible with Microsoft file formats, but also offers a feature-packed full service office suite that can do most anything that existing ones can offer.

The one drawback is that it's software to download rather than run in the cloud, but there are hundreds of templates available to use and edit.

LibreOffices huge community of contributors have compiled a brilliant collection of support materials, including a forum and even live chat if you need a hand.

Our favorite open source photo editor, packed with powerful tools

Supports layers

Advanced editing

Many plugins

Powerful and flexible, open source image editor GIMP is as close to Adobe Photoshop as you can get without opening your wallet. It supports layers, and is packed with advanced tools for enhancing your pictures or creating new ones from scratch.

You can adjust every aspect of your pictures appearance manually, or use the dozens of customizable filters and effects to achieve amazing results with just a few clicks. GIMP comes with a huge array of user-created plugins pre-installed, and adding more is a piece of cake.

If you dont need the power of GIMP and prefer a simpler interface, check out Paint.NET another superb open source photo editor thats a little lighter on features, but easier to master.

An open source media player than can handle virtually any file format

Works with almost all audio formats

Optimize playback

Streams internet radio

VR audio

VLC Media Player is one of the worlds most popular free media players, and for good reason it can handle just about any audio file, video file, or media stream you can throw at it, without the need to mess around installing additional codecs. VLC Media Player gives you an amazing degree of control over playback, letting you optimize video and audio for your specific hardware configuration.

VLC Media Player is ideal for streaming podcasts, as well as internet radio stations like Last.fm and TuneIn Radio. Theres also a superb archive of extensions and skins, and the WYSIWYG Skin Editor lets you create your own custom designs.

The latest addition to VLC is 360-degree playback, which lets you enjoy immersive videos with a VR headset, and more exciting developments are on the horizon to keep pace with new video technology.

Great for new users, and an excellent substitute for Windows Movie Maker

Power features

Layered filters

Drag and drop

Basic interface

If youre looking for a great open source video editor, give Shotcut a whirl. It might look a little stark at first, but add some of the optional toolbars and youll soon have its most powerful and useful features your your fingertips.

Some of its best tools include quick filters for audio and video (which are non-destructive and can be layered to achieve different effects), advanced white balancing, wipes and other transitions, color grading, click-and-drag import, and straightforward trimming and compositing of clips.

The perfect tool for recording and editing podcasts and music

Wide range of features

Lots of extensions

Noise filtering

Even if you have the ready cash for an audio editor, you might choose to stick with open source alternative Audacity. It has almost all the tools you need for recording and refining sound files, and any features it lacks can be plugged with its extensive catalog of extensions.

Audacity is the tool of choice for many podcasters, musicians and audiobook narrators thanks to its professional quality results. You can use it to combine clips, copy and paste sections of audio, remove noise and other unwanted noises, strip vocals from songs, alter frequencies, and apply effects like echo and reverb.

An powerful, fully customizable browser with a plugin for every purpose

Lots of plugins

Private browsing

Memory hog

The browser wars show no sign of ending, but Firefox's open source heritage makes it incredibly flexible. Its main appeal is its collection of extensions. With thousands of plug-ins available at the click of a mouse, its easy to transform Firefox into your perfect browser.

Firefox is updated every five to eight weeks, and you can get an early taste of the latest features by installing the beta or taking part in Firefox Test Pilot a way to sample experimental tools that might be incorporated into future releases.

Firefoxs source code forms the basis of many specialist projects, including the security-focused Tor Browser and speed-centric Waterfox, which is designed with power users in mind.

However, despite Firefox's rise in popularity, the browser has traditionally struggled to handle Flash, resulting in Firefox becoming unstable and consuming processor resources or simply shutting down unexpectedly.

A free and open source alternative to Microsoft Outlook

Lots of features

Additional plugins

Not cloud-based

If you have multiple email accounts even if theyre with the same provider open source email client Mozilla Thunderbird will save you time and hassle flicking between browser tabs and logins. Like Firefox, Thunderbird is an open source project published by the Mozilla Foundation, and is almost infinitely adaptable.

Thunderbird's standard features include an RSS reader and the ability to link to files too large to send as attachments, and its optional extras include weather forecasts and Google app tabs. Other plugins include privacy protection and enhanced security.

However, the one negative is that there is no cloud version so emails have to be stored on your PC, so take care to keep these backed up.

Generate strong passwords for accounts and store them in a secure vault

Easy to use

Strong encryption

Portable program

Theres no shortage of free password managers, but KeePass Password Safe is our favorite open source option. Its not flashy, but its packed with all the tools and features you could want, including AES encryption of your entire database of login details (not just the passwords themselves), two-factor authentication via both a master password and key file, and secure random password generation.

KeePass is tiny, and because its a portable program you can carry it on a USB stick, and thanks to an extensive library of plug-ins, its easy to integrate with your preferred browser and cloud storage provider.

The open source FTP software client

Easy to use

Drag and drop

Fully featured

If you run your own website, the chances are you'll need FTP software to upload files directly to your server. While there are some good existing FTP clients out there, FileZillais probably the best free version you can use.

It does all that you need to with a file upload client, which remains relatively simple anyway. On the left pane, FileZilla presents you with a view of your folder selection (from Windows Explorer, if using Windows) where you can ensure you select your folder of files to upload - on the right, the pane shows your location on the server, which will be a similar-looking file tree.

You just need to ensure you click through the folders on the right pane to the place where you want to upload your files, such as within thePublic_HTML folder on many Linux servers. Then it's simply a matter of using drag and drop to move your files to upload from the left pane and into the right pane.

Simple, easy, and usually very painless. The main stumbling block for most first-time users is not selecting the correct files to upload, or especially the correct locations.

If you need to CHMOD permissions for files, that's as easy as a right-click on any files or folders you need to apply them to, and that's about it.

The open source operating system

Increasingly accessible

Good features

Strong security

Overwhelming choice of distros

It used to be the case that Linuxwas solely the preserve of geeks and code junkies - it made little attempt to appeal to a wide user base. Those days are long since over, and varieties of Linux have made a big effort to be a lot more user-friendly for people with little if anything coding knowledge, and present a serious rival to Windows and Apple Mac iOS as alternatives for running your desktop.

These efforts have helped to edge Linux toward the mainstream, as underlined by computer giant Dell moving to sell Linux desktops and laptops directly to the public. Better still, Windows remains the target of choice for hackers, so Linux presents itself as a more secure alternative, so long as you keep updates fresh.

Excerpt from:
Best open source software of 2020: free software for home ...

Open source software has changed the computing landscape forever. In just over 25 years, with little fanfare and even less promotion, its been installed on more devices than its proprietary cousins.

Its the backbone of the internet and runs enterprise mission critical services for most of the worlds largest organisations. Its generally seen as more secure, more agile, faster to drive value from, of higher quality andconsiderably less expensive to deploy, scale and maintain than its competitors the standard proprietary software companies.

Open source software is developed by some of the smartest and highest paid software engineers globally and used by the most ambitious and technologically advanced corporations in the world.

If you still dont believe open source is the future, here are five solid business reasons why your organisation should consider it.

Quality and security

All software has bugs, some functional (the software doesnt do what its supposed to) and some security-based (systems are hacked and information stolen). Security through secrecy has been the tradition of proprietary software, ensuring customers cant access the source code. For mission-critical applications like aircraft control systems, there may only be a few hundredpeople in the world who understand how the software is built and can spot flaws.

However, secrecy hasnt stopped corporate hijacking, zero day vulnerabilities, massive data thefts and blackmail by encryption. By making code visible to everyone, open source software like Linux, Android, WordPress andour own SuiteCRM, is viewed daily by hundreds of thousands of software engineers. Flaws are spotted and fixed quickly while improvements, extensions and additional features are rapidly added.

Cost

All software is an investment with associated costs for implementation, training and on-going support. License fees for proprietary software are a substantial upfront and on-going cost, with a host of additional restrictionsand associated fees. Price is often a barrier to scaling it further. In contrast, open source has no licence fees, no restrictions and can mean savings of between tens of thousands to several million pounds for large businesses.

Stability and control

The history of computing is peppered with hostile acquisitions, motivated by a desire to shut down competitors and force customer migration. Open source is the disruptor which cant be acquired or shut down. Its in thepublic domain and will continue to evolve and improve while theres a community of developers working on it. You cant be forced to upgrade either. If youre happy with the software youre using, nobody can make youchange.

Support

Theres a substantive difference between support from open source vendors and proprietary ones. For the former, its an important income stream. In order to maintain customer loyalty, support services need to be of thehighest calibre and highly responsive to customer needs. For the latter, support is often an afterthought as the customer is already locked in.

Freedom of choice

Open source ultimately provides greater freedom. Companies can download it and host the software on their own servers, or keep it in a public, private, or hybrid cloud. It can be accessed as software-as-a-service (SaaS),kept it in its current format or tailored by companies themselves, the vendor or third parties. Its the ultimate freedom.

Dale Murray is CEO at Stirling-based open source software developer SalesAgility

Link:
Five reasons why your business should adopt open source software - Insider.co.uk

A large number of multi billion dollar open source companies are functioning in the space of analytics and real-time business intelligence.

If we look at open-source, it seems the idea of creating a business model around it may seem counterintuitive. Yet, more and more startups are moving towards the open-source business model due to its freedom and the collaborative effort it provides. Plus, there can be much more value that startups can derive from providing extra services around the software product.

In this article, we take a look at the most prominent companies which focused on open source as the basis of their growth strategy and became unicorns. We can see that the trend is clear A large number of open source unicorns are functioning in the space of analytics and real-time business intelligence.

Valuation: $30 Billion

Red Hat is the biggest company which deals in open source software for businesses. The company was founded in 1993 and is based in Raleigh, North Carolina in the US. Red Hat is widely known for its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The company works on a business model based on open-source software, development within a community, professional quality assurance, and subscription-based customer support. Red Hat makes money on subscriptions for customer services, training, and integration services that help enterprises in utilising their open-source software products.

Red Hat makes, maintains, and contributes to multiple free software projects, which shows its open-source spirit. It has bought many companies with proprietary software product codebases and released the software under open source licenses. As of March 2016, Red Hat is the second-largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel version 4.14 after Intel. At the end of 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire the company for $34 billion- IBMs largest acquisition to date.

Valuation: $6.5 Billion

MuleSoft is an open-source company based in San Francisco which provides an integration platform to assist businesses to connect data, applications and devices across on-premises and cloud computing environments. Its open-source product Anypoint Platform, integration products were built to integrate software as a service (SaaS), on-premises software, legacy systems, and more.

MuleSofts Anypoint Platform includes multiple components like Anypoint Design Center for API developers to design and build APIs; Anypoint Exchange, a library for API providers to share APIs, templates, and assets; and finally Anypoint Management Center, a centralised web interface to analyse, manage, and monitor APIs and integrations. On May 2, 2018, Salesforce acquired Mulesoft for $6.5 billion in a cash and stock deal.

Valuation: $6 Billion

Databricks provides a unified data analytics platform, powered by Apache Spark to unify data science, engineering and business. It is a single cloud platform for huge-scale data engineering and collaborative data science workloads. Databricks supports Python, Scala, R, Java and SQL, as well as data science frameworks and libraries including TensorFlow, PyTorch and Scikit-learn.

Valuation: $5 Billion

Elastic NV is a search organisation which makes self-managed and SaaS products for use cases including search, logging, security, and analytics use cases. Elastic NV manages free open source Elastic Stack with Elasticsearch- a search engine which provides a distributed, multitenant -capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. There are also other paid features Elastic Cloud (a family of SaaS solutions including the Elasticsearch Service), and Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE).

Elastic open-source search technology is used by eBay, Wikipedia, Yelp, Uber, Lyft, Tinder, and Netflix. Elastic is also implemented in use cases such as application search, site search, enterprise search, logging, infrastructure monitoring, application performance management (APM), security analytics (also used to augment SIEM applications), and business analytics. The Elasticsearch meetup community totals more than 100,000 members.

Elasticsearch is built alongside a data collection and log -parsing engine known as Logstash, an analytics and visualisation platform and Beats, a collection of lightweight data shippers, which are built to be used used as an integrated solution, known to as the Elastic Stack.

Valuation: $ 2.5 Billion

Confluent is an American big data company which is focused on the open-source Apache Kafka, a real-time messaging technology. The company provides Stream Analytics which gives immediate access to significant business intelligence insights to users through real-time data analytics. Kafka began for Linkedin in 2010 to handle all the data flowing through a company and to do it in near real-time. Its streaming data technology processes massive amounts of data in real-time, which is valuable in a data-intensive environment in many companies.

The founders open-sourced technology in 2011. Today, Kafka is mostly used as a central repository of streams, where logs are stored in Kafka for an intermediate period a data cluster for further processing and analysis before the date is routed elsewhere. While the base open-source component remains available for free download, it doesnt include the additional tooling the company has built to make it easier for enterprises to use Kafka. Recent additions include a managed cloud version of the product and a marketplace, Confluent Hub, for sharing extensions to the platform.

Valuation: $ 2 Billion

Founded in 2012, HashiCorp is a software company based in San Francisco, California with a freemium open source business model. HashiCorp provides solutions which help developers, operators and security personnel to provision, secure, run and connects cloud-computing infrastructure.

HashiCorp gives a suite of open-source tools which work to support development and deployment of large-scale service-based software installations. Every solution aims at particular stages in the life cycle of a soft product and seeks to automate it. Hashicorp tools have a plugin-oriented architecture to provide integration with third-party technologies and services. Extra proprietary features for a few of those tools are given commercially and are targeted at enterprise customers.

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What Are The Biggest Open Source Software Companies In The World? - Analytics India Magazine

Updated Sonos is doubling down on its previously disclosed inclination to drop support for older products that aren't profitable to support.

The Internet-of-Things speaker biz said on Tuesday that it will stop providing software updates for some legacy gear in May some of which are barely five years old. The cessation of service doesn't have any immediate consequences but it dooms older devices to stasis, insecurity, and potential incompatibility as software from Sonos or its partners change.

There is one caveat: customers with a mix of legacy and modern Sonos gear won't be able to run both together once a future update moves modern kit to a new version of the Sonos software. So legacy gear will have to be quarantined on its own network, a capability Sonos intends to facilitate shortly.

Affected products include its original Zone Players (released in 2006), Connect, and Connect:Amp (sold between 2011 and 2015), its first-generation Play:5 (released in 2009), C200 (released 2009), and Bridge (released 2007).

"Today the Sonos experience relies on an interconnected ecosystem, giving you access to more than 100 streaming services, voice assistants, and control options like Apple AirPlay 2," the gizmo maker said in a blog post.

"Without new software updates, access to services and overall functionality of your sound system will eventually be disrupted, particularly as partners evolve their technology."

The phrase "will eventually be disrupted" offers no hint of who might be responsible for said disruption. But the company's recent financial filings explain that Sonos itself has planned for the obsolescence of its products and the discontent of customers.

"We expect that in the near term, this backward compatibility will no longer be practical or cost-effective, and we may decrease or discontinue service for our older products," the manufacturer's Q4 2019 10-K financial filing explains. "If we no longer provide extensive backward capability for our products, we may damage our relationship with our existing customers, as well as our reputation, brand loyalty and ability to attract new customers."

This is the same tech outfit that celebrates its environmental and social responsibilities by encouraging customers to flip a kill switch on older products so they cannot be resold in order to trade-in their bricked kit for a 30 per cent discount on new Sonos gear.

Planned obsolescence is common among software-centric companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, which only support products for a set period of time. But it hasn't been the norm for makers of home appliances and consumer electronics, where buyers expect products to last more than a few years or even decades.

With more and more companies embracing software-oriented business models, product expiration dates have spread to other market segments. But consumer expectations, as Sonos anticipated, haven't followed. That's evident in the reactions of some Sonos customers on the company's discussion forum.

"What kind of company just phases out your equipment regardless of how much money you spent on it?" wrote one unidentified keyboard warrior.

"You guys seriously SUCK. All you have done since I invested in your products is destroy them and remove functionality. You offer a pathetic 30 per cent buyback on only some products, when you should be offering 100 per cent buyback on everything. YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT. Im done with you crooks, I hope you get hit with a class action lawsuit and go bankrupt."

That said, it's hard to imagine a better advertisement for open source software.

On Thursday, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence published an open letter promising that legacy Sonos products will continue to get bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible, though not new features. Also, he confirmed that the company is working on a way to split your system so that modern products will work with each other and, separately, legacy products will work with each other.

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Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons - The Register

Open development for SOCs gets major boost with new collaboration

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 22, 2020 CHIPS Alliance, the leading consortium advancing common and open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, today announced industry leading chipmaker Intel as its newest member. Intel is contributing the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) to CHIPS Alliance to foster broad adoption.

CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation to foster a collaborative environment to accelerate the creation and deployment of open SoCs, peripherals and software tools for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The CHIPS Alliance project develops high-quality open source Register Transfer Level (RTL) code and software development tools relevant to the design of open source CPUs, SoCs, and complex peripherals for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and custom silicon.

Intel is joining CHIPS Alliance to share the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) as an open-source, royalty-free PHY-level standard for connecting multiple semiconductor die within the same package. This effort is intended to encourage an industry environment in which silicon IP can be developed using any semiconductor process as a chiplet, and easily integrated with other chiplets into a single device to deliver new levels of functionality and optimization. Broader adoption and support for AIB-enabled chiplets will help device developers grow beyond the limits of traditional monolithic semiconductor manufacturing and reduce the cost of development. Working together, Intel and CHIPS Alliance will encourage the growth of an industry ecosystem which engenders more device innovation via heterogeneous integration.

The AIB specifications and collateral will be further developed in the Interconnects workgroup. The group will begin work imminently to make new contributions to foster increased innovation and adoption. All AIB technical details will be placed in the CHIPS Alliance github. In addition, Intel will have a seat on the governing board of CHIPS Alliance. Go to http://www.chipsalliance.org to learn more about the organization or to join the workgroup mailing list.

We couldnt be more happy to welcome Intel to CHIPS Alliance. said Dr. Zvonimir Bandi, Chairman, CHIPS Alliance, and senior director of next-generation platforms architecture at Western Digital. Intels selection of CHIPS Alliance for the AIB specifications affirms the leading role that the organization impacts for open source hardware and software development tools. We look forward to faster adoption of AIB as an open source chiplet interface.

About the CHIPS Alliance

The CHIPS Alliance is an organization which develops and hosts high-quality, open source hardware code (IP cores), interconnect IP (physical and logical protocols), and open source software development tools for design, verification, and more. The main aim is to provide a barrier-free collaborative environment, to lower the cost of developing IP and tools for hardware development. The CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit chipsalliance.org.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation was founded in 2000 and has since become the worlds leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Today, the Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and its projects are critical to the worlds infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on employing best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, visit linuxfoundation.org.

Excerpt from:
Intel joins CHIPS Alliance to promote Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) as an open standard - Design and Reuse

Kicking off 2020, security and privacy is a hot topic between the latest standoff between Apple and the FBI over the Pensacola incident as well as Apple reportedly abandoning its plan to bring end-to-end encryption to iCloud backups. With an in-depth report on what a robust iPhone cracking operation looks like from the inside, Fast Company shares some fascinating details and photos of NYCs $10 million cyber lab.

Fast Company calls New York CitysHigh Technology Analysis Unit lab ground zero in the encryption battle between US government and tech companies like Apple. And it goes way beyond some third-party devices made by companies like Cellebrite or Grayshift.

The lab has been built by Manhattans cybercrime unit and district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and it includes an RF isolation chamber to give them the best chance of cracking iPhones and iPads before alleged criminals can erase them remotely.

The entrance to the radiofrequency isolation chamber, near the middle of the Lefkowitz Building in lower Manhattan, looks like an artifact from the Apollo program, shielded by two airtight, metallic doors that are specially designed to block electromagnetic waves. Inside the room, against one wall, are dozens of Apple iPhones and iPads in various states of disrepair. Some have cracked glass fronts or broken cases. Others look like theyve been fished out of a smoldering campfire. Of course, the devices are not there to be fixed. They are evidence confiscated during the commission of alleged crimes.

The district attorney of Manhattan, Cyrus Vance Jr., and the citys cybercrime unit have built this electronic prison for a very specific purpose: to try, using brute force algorithms, to extract the data on the phones before their owners try to wipe the contents remotely.

The report highlights nearly 3,000 phones waiting to be cracked at the lab whenFast Company visited. TheHigh Technology Analysis Units director, Steven Moran says they have created a special, custom process with open source software to deal with the amount of devices they get and to know what third-party vendors to work with for cracking iPhones.

On the day I visited the cyber lab, there were nearly 3,000 phones, most related to active criminal investigations, that Moran had not yet been able to access. The team has built a proprietary workflow management program, using open source software, to triage the incredible volume of incoming devices and to escalate the most important cases. So if a third party were to say hey, we have a solution that will work on iOS 12.1.2 and it costs X amount of dollars, I can see within five seconds that thats going to affect 16 different phones, Moran says.

After the San Bernardino case, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said they decided to build out the high tech lab.

We had to figure out what we were going to do with this new situation over which we had no control, Vance says. So at a cost of some $10 million, Vance decided to build his own high-tech forensics labthe first of its kind within a local prosecutors office.

With that budget, theHigh Technology Analysis Units director, Steven Moran got some seriously powerful hardware, custom software, and a team of security experts.

The labs supercomputer is able to create up to 26 million passcode guesses a second and theres a robot that can remove a memory chip without using heat.

Moran stocked the cyberlab with mind-bending hardware and a crack team of technology experts, many of whom are ex-military. Proprietary software provides prosecutors with real-time information about each smartphone in their possession, which can be removed from the radiofrequency-shielded room using Ramsey boxesminiaturized versions of the isolation chamber that allow technicians to manipulate the devices safely. In other corners of the lab are a supercomputer that can generate 26 million random passcodes per second, a robot that can remove a memory chip without using heat, and specialized tools that can repair even severely damaged devices.

Another interesting statistic, 4 out of 5 smartphones that the DAs office in Manhattan get are now locked, when five years ago, only 52% were.

Five years ago, only 52% of the smartphones that the District Attorneys office obtained were locked. Today, that figure is 82%. Vance says the cybercrime lab is able to successfully crack about half of the phones in his possession, but whenever Apple or Google update their software, they have to adapt.

The Manhattan DA is also aware that the lab hes been able to create isnt a possibility for most cities and highlights his belief that its not the answer.

Vance is careful to say that hes not whining about the problem. He knows he is better off than 99% of the other jurisdictions in the country. Thanks in part to the billions of dollars the city has collected from prosecuting financial crimes on Wall Street, Vance is able to continue operating his $10 million lab. But its not the answer, he says, and its not the answer for the country because we are an office that is uniquely able to pay for expensive services.

In the end, Vance just wants prosecutors to have all the tools available to do their jobs. You entrust us with this responsibility to protect the public, he says. At the same time, theyApple and Google have taken away one of our best sources of information. Just because they say so. Its not that some third party has decided, this is the right thing for Apple and Google to do. They just have done it.

But of course, Apple is likely to change its position or focus on iPhone security and privacy, so the cat and mouse game will continue on.

The full Fast Company piece on Manhattans high tech iPhone cracking lab is definitely worth a read.

Images via Fast Company

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Heres what a $10 million lab dedicated to cracking iPhones looks like - 9to5Mac

Members of the UVM-Google team, left to right: Juniper Lovato, director of education and outreach for Complex Systems; Nick Cheney, research assistant professor, Computer Science; Jim Bagrow, associate professor, Mathematics and Statistics; Laurent Hbert-Dufresne, assistant professor, Computer Science; Julia Ferraioli, Open Source atGoogle; Peter Dodds, director of the Complex Systems Center andprofessor, Mathematics and Statistics; and Amanda Casari, Open Source at Google. (Photo: Brian Jenkins)

Vermont Business Magazine The Google Open Source Programs Office, a division of Google that manages Googles use and release of open source software and promotes open source programming, has provided the University of Vermont (UVM) Complex Systems Center a $1 million unrestricted gift to support open source research.

Open source is about more than the softwareits a framework that defines how software is created, released, shared, and distributed, as well as the community that is formed around it.

The goal of the UVM project is to deepen understanding of how people, teams and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings, especially in open-source projects and communities. The Google award will establish a collaboration between the Google Open Source team and UVM to begin building a community-oriented body of research focused on understanding how open source platforms are used and what makes technology-rich environments thrive.

UVM is deeply committed to building its thought-leadership in the area of open source science. This gift will enable our internationally-recognized Complex Systems Center faculty and students to create new knowledge on how open source communities can be most successful and transformative, said Suresh Garimella, University of Vermont president. The collaboration will also serve as a research hub, bringing together a variety of researchers in open source science, both at UVM and Google, to form a powerful network of collaborators.

"UVM has a long track record of conducting interesting and dynamic research in the space of complex systems problems of all kinds, said Chris DiBona, director of Open Source at Google. We're excited to begin this collaboration with the team at UVM, through which we hope to develop a roadmap for better understanding of open source communities, behavior and creativity.

The University of Vermont Complex Systems team has identified the initial research projects that will be conducted with the award. They include:

How people, teams, and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings.Trade-offs between organizational structure and the spread of ideas and information.Investigating how scientists and software developers use computational and collaborative tools and platforms.Understanding what conditions allow individuals and communities to succeed in open source software and open science.

Researching how people and teams interact in organizations is a powerful way to understand and advance the open source movement, said Laurent Hbert-Dufresne, assistant professor of Computer Science, and one of the principal investigators on the project. We're very excited to integrate the multidisciplinary team in the Complex Systems Center in an effort to understand how information flows in social networks and how creativity emerges.

James Bagrow, associate professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and the projects other principal investigator, underscored its collaborative nature. This is an amazing opportunity to work with fascinating new data and thought leaders. We look forward to a strongand ongoingcollaboration.

In addition to the core team, two postdoctoral positions are currently open in associated research areas. Other UVM faculty involved with the research include Josh Bongard, professor of Computer Science; Peter Dodds, professor of Mathematics and Statistics; Nick Cheney, research assistant professor of Computer Science; and Chris Danforth, professor of Mathematics and Statistics. The UVM program director is Juniper Lovato, director of outreach for the Complex Systems Center.

The Google collaboration reflects UVMs commitment to its land-grant mission to enhance the intellectual, human, economic and social capital of its community, the state, and the nation.

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Google gives $1 million to UVM to advance open source research - Vermont Biz

iMSTK 2.0 and Pulse 2.3 released in advance of International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH)

Clifton Park, NY, Jan. 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kitware, a leader in open source software research and development, has released the latest versions of two of its popular medical training and simulation toolkits the Interactive Medical Simulation Toolkit (iMSTK) 2.0 and the Pulse Physiology Engine (Pulse) 2.3. Updates to these toolkits include improved models and functionality based on feedback from user and developer communities. Kitware will showcase these latest features and improvements at the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) in San Diego, January 18-22 at booth 912.

Both iMSTK and Pulse provide the technology to build virtual simulators that can help practicing surgeons, medical students, residents, and nurses to rehearse or plan medical procedures. For example, iMSTK has been used to help medical professionals prepare for biopsies, resectioning, radiosurgery, and laparoscopy without compromising patient safety in the operating room. It can also help accredit potential surgeons in basic skills for laparoscopy, endoscopy or robotic surgery. Pulse provides necessary physiologic feedback for clinicians training to provide life-saving medical treatment, such as for hemorrhage, tension pneumothorax, airway trauma, ventilator use and settings, and anaphylaxis.

Kitwares medical computing team is dedicated to advancing research solutions in the medical community, said Andinet Enquobahrie, the director of medical computing at Kitware. Whether we are collaborating with a university on research, working with our communities to improve our software platforms, or partnering with another company to integrate our software into their products and projects, our goal is to provide application developers the tools they need to develop powerful applications for medical skill training.

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iMSTK 2.0 Improves Features, Efficiency of Physics, Collision and Rendering Modules

iMSTK is a free, open source toolkit that offers product developers and researchers all the software components they need to build and test virtual simulators for medical training and planning. Release 2.0 offers improved functionality with many new features as well as refactored modules that address the ease-of-use, and extendability of the API. Specifically, it has greatly improved the features as well as the efficiency of the physics, collision modules, and rendering modules.

Here are some release highlights:

New octree collision detection adds efficient loose octree data structure for broad phase collision detection

New rigid body dynamics support for simpler geometrical shapes and surface meshes, and collision between them

Multithreading support added using Intel Thread Building Blocks (TBB)

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) for simulating fluids with varied viscosity and surface tension

Extended simulation modes that allow iMSTK to work as a physics backend allowing easier integration into external software

Improved Vulkan backend, on-screen text rendering, CMake build and installation, and more.

Pulse 2.3 Improves Models and Functionality to Advance the Engine for Customer Needs

Pulse is a free, open source physiology engine that is used to rapidly prototype virtual simulation applications. These applications simulate whole-body human physiology through adult computational physiology models. Release 2.3 includes updates that were the result of Kitwares work with users to improve models and functionality of the engine.

Here are some release highlights:

C# API updates used in our Unity Asset, such as support for more actions, custom data requests to retrieve any data calculated by pulse, patient creation including chronic conditions

Magic Leap is now a supported platform by our the Pulse Unity Asset version 2.0

Significant respiratory model updates, such as changing the standard respiration rate from 16 bpm to 12 bpm; use of ideal body weight for determining lung volumes; refactored respiratory muscle driver with a new waveform, and more.

For more information about iMSTK, visit the iMSTK website. For more information about Pulse, visit the newly redesigned Pulse website or sign up for the Pulse newsletter. To receive the latest updates on all of Kitwares software platforms, subscribe to our blog.

About Kitware

Since 1998, Kitware has been providing software research and development services to customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including government and academic laboratories worldwide. Kitwares core areas of expertise are computer vision, data and analytics, high-performance computing and visualization, medical computing, and software process. The company has grown to more than 150 employees, with offices in Clifton Park, NY; Arlington, VA; Carrboro, NC; Santa Fe, NM; and Lyon, France. For more information visit kitware.com.

Jillian CutroneKitware, Inc.jillian.cutrone@kitware.com

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Kitware Offers Latest Innovations in Healthcare Simulation with Updates to Interactive Medical Simulation Toolkit and Pulse Physiology Engine - Yahoo...

Felicia Baudry with Equinox Open Library Initiative visited Alton Library to train Oregon County Library District librarians how to use the new software system that will be implemented soon.

Renee Janes

Oregon County Libraries were recently closed to introduce employees to a new software system that will enable librarians and patrons to expand their resources.

The new system they are going to use is called Evergreen, which is software being used, but they are also joining the Missouri Evergreen Library Consortium. It is a consortium of over 50 libraries that have come together to work together and collaborate to make sure they have the best quality system they can provide to their patrons, said Felicia Baudry with Equinox Open Library Consortium.

She explained Evergreen is an open source software used to manage inventory and patrons. This is what will be used to check materials in and out and add patrons. They will also be able to share their materials with other libraries within the Missouri Evergreen and other Missouri Evergreen libraries will be able to share their materials with them. It is an easy way to move materials back and forth between libraries, said Baudry.

The integrated library system will enable patrons to search what is available from other Missouri Evergreen libraries and place holds on them.

It expands their collection, said Baudry.

There are a lot of advantages to joining a library consortium. I think it maximizes the investment that all the funders give to their libraries at state and local levels. So, it expands what they can do and their reach. It helps libraries do, what I think libraries were always intended to do, which is to share information with everyone. It is a nice way to give as much as you can to the community, said Baudry.

Our patrons will be able to log on at home and place holds on books and things like that

The system will enable patrons to log on from wherever they have internet access and search the catalog and place holds on books and have them sent to an Oregon County Library.

Oregon County Library Coordinator Janice Richardson explained patrons accounts will be created when the system goes live, and they will manage their own accounts.

If an individual already has an Oregon County Library card, they will have one when the new system begins. Those without a card will need to visit an Oregon County Library to register. Logging in will not be required to search the system but will be needed to see what they have checked out and place holds on items.

We, as staff, we are doing this training now. We are excited to offer this to the community and would like for everyone to come in and see what its about and use the libraries here, said Richardson

The system will be accessible to patrons at the beginning of February.

Baudry is a trainer with Equinox Open Library Initiative. We are the organization that provides support and training and development for Missouri Evergreen. We also work closely with the Evergreen community to help support the system itself. Because of its open source, it is freely available to anybody who uses it. There is a large community around it that creates documentation, develop features, but we are just one of the organizations that participates in doing that and we are providing the support for Missouri EvergreenWe are two separate entities, but work very closely with the Evergreen community, said Baudry.

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OC Library District to join Missouri Evergreen Library Consortium - Areawide News