Category: News

New DizmeID Foundation and technical project to advance the development of identity credentialing

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 24, 2021 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the DizmeID Foundation and technical project with the intent to support digital identity credentialing. The effort will combine the benefits of self-sovereign identity with necessary compliance and regulation, with the aim to enable wallet holders with ownership and control over their digital identity and data access and distribution.

Founding Premier Members of the DizmeID Foundation include: Algorand, Fabrick and InfoCert.

A.P.S.P.  is an Associate Member. Participation also includes a Start-up Supporter program for small organizations that want to advance the development of digital identity. Initial startups include eTuitus, Faberbee, Mopso/Amlet and Nym.

The DizmeID technical project leverages the Trust Over IP metamodel and builds upon three areas of existing infrastructure to focus its work on layer 4 that defines and implements the DizmeID features and business model.

“I’m proud to see our InfoCert research project becoming today the DizmeID Foundation cornerstone. We are ready to work with DizmeID Foundation members and all the community contributors in a joint effort to push the adoption of decentralized identity vision and bridge the gap between SSI and eIDAS,” said Daniele Citterio, Chief Technology Officer of InfoCert.

The DizmeID Foundation and technical project will define and allow for implementation of Dizme features on top of Sovrin public identity utility. The Dizme ecosystem is expected to include various technological components leveraging Hyperledger stack and adding a monetization layer based on Algorand blockchain protocol, which will enable the exchange of verifiable credentials and the development of new vertical applications. The identity credentials are managed with three levels of assurance: low, self-declared information; medium, automatic checks; and substantial, trusted identification. These levels of assurance would enable industry to have safer, innovative and cost-effective onboarding processes.

“We are thrilled that the DizmeID Foundation and Linux Foundation have chosen Algorand as the efficient transactional layer for their innovative self-sovereign identity solutions. With a shared vision of decentralized digital identity as a key primitive of the new way of exchanging value, we are honored that Algorand is a Founding Member of this important initiative,” said Pietro Grassano, Business Solutions Director Europe for Algorand.

“We at Fabrick are happy to be one of the Founding Member of DizmeID Foundation. We are pleased to share the vision of building an innovative open and decentralized identity framework with top-notch partners such as InfoCert and Algorand. We strongly believe Dizme ecosystem will sooner be one of the key innovation pillars enabling our Open Finance Ecosystem growth,” said Paolo Zaccardi, CEO and cofounder of Fabrick.

“As part of the Linux Foundation, DizmeID Foundation will take advantage of existing innovations in open governance and blockchain technology communities,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “DizmeID Foundation will take us one step closer to a self-sovereign identity future.”

DizmeID Foundation is calling for members and contributors to help build the Dizme ecosystem. For more information and to contribute to this work, please visit: https://www.dizme.io/foundation

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

pr@linuxfoundation.org

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Long-time Linux kernel maintainers Gustavo Silva and Nathan Chancellor to dedicate their focus to maintaining and improving Linux security for the long-term

SAN FRANCISCO, February 24, 2021 — Today, Google and the Linux Foundation announced they are prioritizing funds to underwrite two full-time maintainers for Linux kernel security development, Gustavo Silva and Nathan Chancellor.

Silva and Chancellor’s exclusive focus is to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives in order to ensure the world’s most pervasive open source software project is sustainable for decades to come.

The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) recently published an open source contributor survey report that identified a need for additional work on security in open source software, which includes the massively pervasive Linux operating system. Linux is fueled by more than 20,000 contributors and as of August 2020, one million commits. While there are thousands of Linux kernel developers, all of whom take security into consideration as the due course of their work, this contribution from Google to underwrite two full-time Linux security maintainers signals the importance of security in the ongoing sustainability of open source software.

“At Google, security is always top of mind and we understand the critical role it plays to the sustainability of open source software,” said Dan Lorenc, Staff Software Engineer, Google. “We’re honored to support the efforts of both Gustavo Silva and Nathan Chancellor as they work to enhance the security of the Linux kernel.”

Chancellor’s work will be focused on triaging and fixing all bugs found with Clang/LLVM compilers while working on establishing continuous integration systems to support this work ongoing. Once those aims are well-established, he plans to begin adding features and polish to the kernel using these compiler technologies. Chancellor has been working on the Linux kernel for four and a half years. Two years ago, Chancellor started contributing to mainline Linux under the ClangBuiltLinux project, which is a collaborative effort to get the Linux kernel building with Clang and LLVM compiler tools.

“I hope that more and more people will start to use the LLVM compiler infrastructure project and contribute fixes to it and the kernel – it will go a long way towards improving Linux security for everyone,” said Chancellor, Linux maintainer.

Gustavo Silva’s full-time Linux security work is currently dedicated to eliminating several classes of buffer overflows by transforming all instances of zero-length and one-element arrays into flexible-array members, which is the preferred and least error-prone mechanism to declare such variable-length types. Additionally, he is actively focusing on fixing bugs before they hit the mainline, while also proactively developing defense mechanisms that cut off whole classes of vulnerabilities. Silva sent his first kernel patch in 2010 and today is an active member of the Kernel Self Protection Project (KSPP). He is consistently one of the top five most active kernel developers since 2017 with more than 2,000 commits in mainline. Silva’s work has impacted 27 different stable trees, going all the way down to Linux v3.16.

“We are working towards building a high-quality kernel that is reliable, robust and more resistant to attack every time,” said Silva, Linux maintainer. “Through these efforts, we hope people, maintainers in particular, will recognize the importance of adopting changes that will make their code less prone to common errors.”

“Ensuring the security of the Linux kernel is extremely important as it’s a critical part of modern computing and infrastructure. It requires us all to assist in any way we can to ensure that it is sustainably secure,” said David A. Wheeler, the Linux Foundation. “We extend a special thanks to Google for underwriting Gustavo and Nathan’s Linux kernel security development work along with a thank you to all the maintainers, developers and organizations who have made the Linux kernel a collaborative global success.”

Funding Linux kernel security and development is a collaborative effort, supported by the world’s largest companies that depend on the Linux operating system. To support work like this, discussions are taking place in the Securing Critical Projects Working Group inside the OpenSSF.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

Jennifer Cloer
Story Changes Culture
503-867-2304
jennifer@storychangesculture.com

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The Linux Foundation will host seven Call for Code for Racial Justice projects created by IBM and Red Hat employees

San Francisco, Calif., Feb. 19, 2021 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host seven projects from Call for Code for Racial Justice, an initiative driven by IBM and Creator David Clark Cause to urge the global developer ecosystem and open source community to contribute to solutions that can help confront racial inequalities.

Call for Code for Racial Justice launched in October 2020, and facilitates the adoption and innovation of open source projects by developers, ecosystem partners, and communities across the world to promote racial justice across three focus areas: Police & Judicial Reform and Accountability; Diverse Representation; and Policy & Legislation Reform. The initiative builds upon Call for Code, which was created in 2018 and has grown to over 400,000 developers and problem solvers across 179 countries, in partnership with Creator David Clark Cause, Founding Partner IBM, Charitable Partner United Nations Human Rights, and the Linux Foundation.

“Open source technology has an important role to play in addressing the greatest challenges of our time, and that includes racial justice,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “We are excited to host and support these projects at the Linux Foundation, and look forward to how they will develop and deploy through contributions from the open source community.”

As part of today’s announcement, the Linux Foundation and IBM unveiled two new solution starters, Fair Change and TakeTwo:

Fair Change is a platform to help record, catalog, and access evidence of potentially racially charged incidents to help enable transparency, reeducation and reform as a matter of public interest and safety. For example, real-world video footage related to routine traffic stops, stop and search or other scenarios, may be recorded and accessed by the involved parties and authorities to determine whether the incidents were handled in a biased manner. Fair Change consists of a mobile application for iOS and Android built using React Native, an API for capturing data from various sources built using Node JS. It also includes a website with a geospatial map view of incidents built using Google Maps and React. Data can be stored in a cloud hosted database and object store. Visit the tutorial or project page to learn more.

TakeTwo aims to help mitigate bias in digital content, whether it is overt or subtle, with a focus on text across news articles, headlines, web pages, blogs, and even  code. The solution is designed to provide a consistent set of language recommendations, leveraging directories of inclusive terms compiled by trusted sources like the Inclusive Naming Initiative, which was co-founded by the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, and VMware. The terminology is categorized and can be used to train an AI model to enhance its accuracy over time. TakeTwo is built using open source technologies including Python, FastAPI and Docker. The API can be run locally with an Adobe CouchDB backend database or IBM Cloudant database. IBM has already deployed TakeTwo within its existing IBM Developer tools that are used to publish new content produced by hundreds of IBMers each week. TakeTwo is being trialed by IBM for the IBM Developer website content. Visit the tutorial or project page to learn more.

“Viewed from an etymological perspective, language is a manifestation of our inherent viewpoints about society. Many phrases and words may be used in harmless contexts but bear a history that does not support our diverse, multi-cultural engineering community today. To that end, it gives me great pride that the TakeTwo project is leveraging the Inclusive Naming Initiative to provide language guidance to anyone seeking to write consciously across all platforms. By expanding beyond developers with solutions like TakeTwo, Inclusive Naming is becoming essential to a diverse and resilient community of doers and we are very honored,” said Priyanka Sharma, General Manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

In addition to the two new solution starters, the Linux Foundation will now host five existing and evolving open source projects from Call for Code for Racial Justice:

• Five Fifths Voter: This web app empowers minorities to exercise their right to vote and helps ensure their voice is heard by determining optimal voting strategies and limiting suppression issues.
• Legit-Info: Local legislation can have significant impacts on areas as far-reaching as jobs, the environment, and safety. Legit-Info helps individuals understand the legislation that shapes their lives.
• Incident Accuracy Reporting System: This platform allows witnesses and victims to corroborate evidence or provide additional information from multiple sources against an official police report.
• Open Sentencing: To help public defenders better serve their clients and make a stronger case, Open Sentencing shows racial bias in data such as demographics.
• Truth Loop: This app helps communities simply understand the policies, regulations, and legislation that will impact them the most. 

These projects were built using technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, Blockchain ledger, Node.js, Vu.js, Docker, upstream Kubernetes and Tekton. The Linux Foundation and IBM are asking developers and ecosystem partners to contribute by testing, extending and implementing them, and adding their own diverse perspectives and expertise to make them even stronger.

“These applications emerged from an internal IBM program called the Call for Code Emb(race) Challenge, where Black IBMers, supported by Red Hat’s Blacks United in Leadership and Diversity (B.U.I.L.D.) community, and allies designed technology solutions to address the problem of systemic racism,” said Ruth Davis, IBM Director of Call for Code. “Since we released the original five projects in October, we have received enthusiastic support from the open source community. In collaboration with the Linux Foundation, we are committed to working to develop and deploy these solutions to help combat racial injustice.”

For more information and to begin contributing, please visit: 

https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/racial-justice/get-started/

https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/racial-justice/projects/

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/call-for-code/  

https://github.com/Call-for-Code-for-Racial-Justice

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

About Call for Code

Developers have revolutionized the way people live and interact with virtually everyone and everything. Where most people see challenges, developers see possibilities. That’s why David Clark Cause created and launched Call for Code in 2018 alongside Founding Partner IBM. This five-year, $30 million global initiative is a rallying cry to developers to use their skills and mastery of the latest technologies, and to create new ones, to drive positive and long-lasting change across the world with their code. Call for Code global winning solutions, among others, are further developed and deployed where they can make the greatest impact.

Red Hat, the Red Hat logo and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.

The post The Linux Foundation and IBM Announce New Open Source Projects to Promote Racial Justice appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Today the Linux Foundation announced that it would be hosting seven projects that originated at Call for Code for Racial Justice, an initiative driven by IBM and Creator David Clark Cause to urge the global developer ecosystem and open source community to contribute to solutions that can help confront racial inequalities. 

Launched by IBM in October 2020, Call for Code for Racial Justice facilitates the adoption and innovation of open source projects by developers, ecosystem partners, and communities across the world to promote racial justice across three distinct focus areas: Police & Judicial Reform and Accountability; Diverse Representation; and Policy & Legislation Reform. 

The initiative builds upon Call for Code, created by IBM in 2018 and has grown to over 400,000 developers and problem solvers in 179 countries, in partnership with Creator David Clark Cause, Founding Partner IBM, Charitable Partner United Nations Human Rights, and the Linux Foundation.

As part of today’s announcement, the Linux Foundation and IBM unveiled two new solution starters, Fair Change and TakeTwo: 

Fair Change is a platform to help record, catalog, and access evidence of potentially racially charged incidents to enable transparency, reeducation, and reform as a matter of public interest and safety. For example, real-world video footage related to routine traffic stops, stop and search, or other scenarios may be recorded and accessed by the involved parties and authorities to determine whether the incidents were handled in a biased manner. Fair Change consists of a mobile application for iOS and Android built using React Native, an API for capturing data from various sources built using Node JS. It also includes a website with a geospatial map view of incidents built using Google Maps and React. Data can be stored in a cloud-hosted database and object-store. Visit the tutorial or project page to learn more. 

TakeTwo aims to help mitigate digital content bias, whether overt or subtle, focusing on text across news articles, headlines, web pages, blogs, and even code. The solution is designed to leverage directories of inclusive terms compiled by trusted sources like the Inclusive Naming Initiative, which the Linux Foundation and CNCF co-founded. The terminology is categorized to train an AI model to enhance its accuracy over time. TakeTwo is built using open source technologies, including Python, FastAPI, and Docker. The API can be run locally with a CouchDB backend database or IBM Cloudant database. IBM has already deployed TakeTwo within its existing IBM Developer tools that are used to publish new content produced by hundreds of IBMers each week. IBM is trialing TakeTwo for IBM Developer website content. Visit the tutorial or project page to learn more.

In addition to the two new solution starters, The Linux Foundation will now host five existing and evolving open source projects from Call for Code for Racial Justice:

• Five-Fifths Voter: This web app empowers minorities to exercise their right to vote and ensures their voice is heard by determining optimal voting strategies and limiting suppression issues.
• Legit-Info: Local legislation can significantly impact areas as far-reaching as jobs, the environment, and safety. Legit-Info helps individuals understand the legislation that shapes their lives.
• Incident Accuracy Reporting System: This platform allows witnesses and victims to corroborate evidence or provide additional information from multiple sources against an official police report.
• Open Sentencing: To help public defenders better serve their clients and make a stronger case, Open Sentencing shows racial bias in data such as demographics.
• Truth Loop: This app helps communities simply understand the policies, regulations, and legislation that will impact them the most.  

These projects were built using open source technologies that include Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, Blockchain ledger, Node.js, Vu.js, Docker, Kubernetes, and Tekton. The Linux Foundation and IBM ask developers and ecosystem partners to contribute to these solutions by testing, extending, implementing them, and adding their own diverse perspectives and expertise to make them even stronger. 

For more information and to begin contributing, please visit: 

https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/racial-justice/get-started/

https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/racial-justice/projects/  

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/call-for-code/  

https://github.com/Call-for-Code-for-Racial-Justice/

The post New Open Source Projects to Confront Racial Justice appeared first on Linux Foundation.

• Partnership enables acceleration of innovation, collaboration, and US competitiveness in areas of 5G, Edge, IOT, AI and Security

• New umbrella organization at the Linux Foundation, US GOV OPS, to host first project, OPS 5G (Open Programmable, Secure), to accelerate 5G, Edge & IoT technologies creation and deployment

• Open Ecosystem efforts aligns on a common open source architecture and set of open source projects and focuses on integrations and enhancements to the secure open source end to end 5G stack.

• Effort leverages the existing networking open source projects and community efforts at the Linux Foundation and industry disruptions like disaggregation, SDN/NFV, and cloud native. 

SAN FRANCISCO –  February 17, 2021 – The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it has signed a collaboration agreement with the  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create open source software that accelerates United States government technology research and development innovation.

Under the agreement, DARPA and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella (US Government Open Programmable Secure (US GOV OPS) that allows United States Government projects, their ecosystem, and open community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, Edge, AI, Standards, Programmability, and IOT among other technologies. The project formation encourages ecosystem players to support US Government initiatives to create the latest in technology software.

The project will launch as a standard open source project with neutral governance and a charter similar to other projects within the Linux Foundation. Additionally, the agreement enables collaboration with upstream and downstream communities such as LF Networking, LF Edge, and Zephyr, among others, to build on a secure code base for use by the US Government.

“DARPA’s use of open source software in the Open Programmable Secure 5G (OPS-5G) program leverages transparency, portability and open access inherent in this distribution model,” said Dr. Jonathan Smith, DARPA Information Innovation Office Program Manager. “Transparency enables advanced software tools and systems to be applied to the code base, while portability and open access will result in decoupling hardware and software ecosystems, enabling innovations by more entities across more technology areas.” 

“We are eager to ally with DARPA and its intent to accelerate secure, open source innovation and US competitiveness across breakthrough technologies,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, & IOT, the Linux Foundation. “This partnership enables transformational change across open software and systems, leveraging the best shared resources across the ecosystem.” 

The new US GOV OPS umbrella will include the Open Programmable Secure- 5G (OPS-5G) program as its first project, currently in formation with the help of DARPA, the US Navy and additional performers. The goal of OPS-5G is to create open source software and systems enabling secure end to end 5G and follow-on mobile networks. OPS-5G will create capabilities to address feature velocity in open source software, mitigating large scale Botnet of Things (BoT), network slicing on suspect gear, and adaptive adversaries operating at scale.

DARPA’s Dr. Jonathan Smith will be presenting at the upcoming Open Networking and Edge Executive Forum (ONEEF) a virtual event taking place March 10-12. This special Executive Edition of Open Networking & Edge Summit, the industry’s premier open networking & edge computing event, will feature executive leadership across the networking and edge ecosystems sharing their visions with a global audience in the Telco, Cloud and Enterprise verticals.

To learn more about US GOV OPS and OPS-5G, please visit www.usgovops.org.      

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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