From coronavirus tests to open-source insulin, 'biohackers' are showing the power of DIY science

In March, amateur scientists in Sydney announced they had created a COVID-19 test kit that is simpler, faster, and cheaper than existing tests. While the test has not yet been approved by regulators, if effective it could play a role in scaling up the world’s coronavirus testing capability.

The test’s creators, associated with a “community lab for citizen scientists” called Biofoundry, are part of a growing international movement of “biohackers” with roots stretching back 30 years or more. Biohacking, also known as DIY biology, takes cues from computer-hacking culture and uses the tools of biological science and biotechnology to carry out experiments and make tools outside any formal research institution.

How to value cloud-based open source software services

The public cloud and open source software are pretty much coupled these days. No matter if you’re running Kubernetes-as-a-service, MySQL, Linux, or that open source text editor you’ve used since college, it’s all there for the taking, as-a-service.

Newton lives on to supercharge your email

Maitrik and Justin here from the NEW CloudMagic/ Newton team. Like you, we LOVE Newton and are excited to take the best professional email client to the next level.

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We promise to open-source Newton and find a way for self-hosted servers to support the product indefinitely so that your contribution is not wasted.

Newton Mail is back from the dead (again) and this time it’s going open source

Newton Mail has had a rough couple of years. The cross-platform email app offered a bunch of nifty features and earned itself a bit of a fan base — but the company must have had a tough time making money because it announced plans to double its price in 2018… then announced it was shutting down.

Then phone maker Essential acquired the company and kept Newton Mail alive… until earlier this year, when Essential announced it was shutting down and that it would pull the plug on Newton Mail on April 30, 2020.

NVIDIA Accelerates Apache Spark, World's Leading Data Analytics Platform

NVIDIA Collaborates with Open-source Community to Bring GPU Acceleration to Apache Spark 3.0

NVIDIA said it is collaborating with the open-source community to bring end-to-end GPU acceleration to Apache Spark 3.0, an analytics engine for big data processing.

The Apache Software Foundation Announces the 10th Anniversary of Apache® HBase™

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the tenth Anniversary of Apache® HBase™, the distributed, scalable data store for the Apache Hadoop Big Data ecosystem.

"The success of Apache HBase is the success of Open Source," said Duo Zhang, Vice President of Apache HBase. "Ten years after graduating as a TLP, HBase is still among the most active projects at the ASF. We have hundreds of contributors all around the world. We speak different languages, we have different skills, but we all work together to make HBase better and better. Ten year anniversary is not the end, but a new beginning, I believe our strong community will lead the project to a bright future."

Simple Dialer is a free, open-source alternative to your default phone app

We've highlighted apps from Simple Mobile Tools before as great, open-source, data-light alternatives to the basic tools Google provides for your Android phone. Now you can notch another one into that belt as the developer has just come out with a Simple Dialer app. And it's free.

PAP, GovTech Polska offer #FakeHunter open source code

The Polish Press Agency (PAP) and GovTech Polska, a Polish government technological agency, have decided to offer an open source code to their landmark #FakeHunter fake news-busting software to anyone interested.

Following the success of the #FakeHunter project, its creators, PAP and GovTech, have decided to offer the source code to the disinformation-fighting tool to other entities under an open licence that allows for copying, development and further distribution of the software.

Open-source container image registry Harbor reaches 2.0 milestone

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) has announced the general availability of Harbor 2.0. The latest release makes it the first OCI-compliant open-source registry capable of storing cloud-native artifacts such as container images, Helm charts, OPAs, and Singularity. In addition, it enables pulling, pushing, deleting, tagging replicating and scanning artifacts.

We'd love to come up with a Harbor container ship pun but we're too corona-frazzled. Version 2.0 is out

Harbor, the open-source container image registry, has reached version 2.0, becoming the first open-source registry to fully support the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image specification.

There are quite a few registries that allow you to store container images – which represent blueprints for launching containerized applications – and other cloud app artifacts that describe related metadata like Helm charts, OPAs (Open Policy Agents), and other configuration-related files.

Perhaps the best known is the open source Docker Registry and Docker Hub, a hosted implementation of that code.

There's also Portus, an authorization server and front-end for Docker Registry made by SUSE. And there are variou

Open source software for public good

A MAJOR weapon in combating the transmission of Covid-19 is contact tracing. In March 2020, Singapore launched TraceTogether - the world's first consent-based contact tracing app which utilises a privacy preserving protocol to anonymise and encrypt BlueTooth proximity data...

Open Source Tools for a Digital Research Ecosystem

Open Source: Applying Innovation to the Slow-Moving Energy Industry

The energy and utility industries are known to be conservative and slow moving in adopting new technology. Cooperatively sharing information is something that utilities don’t do.

But that is changing. As sustainable energy sources, like solar and wind become more cost competitive, and as regulations related to the reduction of carbon emissions require stricter compliance, the industry is being forced into the corner and being made to accept change.

Open source AI collab project ONNX turns 1.7, takes first steps towards multi-framework training

Open machine learning model representation ONNX has hit version 1.7, previewing training support, and including additional operators as well as some model checker and documentation enhancements.

Since the last update, the ONNX team has been busy adding features to represent the various stages of training, to facilitate the distribution of the process between various frameworks in future releases.

Open source community helps responders improve rescue operations

Open source projects take all kinds – well, some do

Some projects actually eschew external contributions. For Roy Rubin, founder of Magento, the project was built in tandem with his company, and he worried that inviting outside contributions to the core of Magento would make it harder to support for customers.

Altitude Angel release ‘SCOUT’ – open source hardware & software platform for remote ID and UTM connectivity

Altitude Angel is releasing an open-sourced project, Scout, consisting of hardware and firmware to enable drone manufacturers, software developers and commercial drone pilots to quickly connect to its global UTM.