tech:

taffy

Mozilla awards $385,000 to Open Source projects as part of ‘Mission Partners’

Mozilla has awarded $380,000 to various open source projects as part of the ‘Mission Partners’ award of the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) continuing program. The program has a budget of $1.25 million for 2016. 

The first eight awardees are:

  • Tor: $152,500. Tor is a system for using a distributed network to communicate anonymously and without being tracked. 
  • Tails: $77,000. Tails is a secure-by-default live operating system that aims at preserving the user’s privacy and anonymity.
  • Caddy: $50,000. Caddy is an HTTP/2 web server that uses HTTPS automatically and by default via Let’s Encrypt.
  • Mio: $30,000. Mio is an asynchronous I/O library written in Rust.
  • DNSSEC/DANE Chain Stapling: $25,000. This project is standardizing and implementing a new TLS extension for transport of a serialized DNSSEC record set, to reduce the latency associated with DANE and DNSSEC validation.
  • Godot Engine: $20,000. Godot is a high-performance multi-platform game engine which can deploy to HTML5.
  • PeARS: $15,500. PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search) is a lightweight, distributed web search engine which runs in an individual’s browser and indexes the pages they visit.
  • NVDA: $15,000. NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows.

The Mission Partners track is open to any open source/free software project which is undertaking an activity which significantly furthers Mozilla’s mission, says the organization. 

Applications remain open both for Mission Partners and for the Foundational Technology track (for projects creating software that Mozilla already uses or deploys) on an ongoing basis, if you want to check them out. 

[Image courtesy: Mozilla]

Just in

Oso Semiconductor raises $5.2M

Oso Semiconductor has raised $5.2 million in seed funding. The round was led by Engine Ventures.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies — CNBC

It’s called ChatGPT Gov and was built specifically for U.S. government use; writes Hayden Field. 

DeepSeek’s popular AI app is explicitly sending US data to China — Wired

Users have already reported several examples of DeepSeek censoring content that is critical of China or its policies, writes Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman. 

DeepSeek hit with large-scale cyberattack, says it’s limiting registrations — CNBC

DeepSeek on Monday said it would temporarily limit user registrations “due to large-scale malicious attacks” on its services; writes Hayden Field.