NLnet foundation

PyCM evaluates the performance of machine learning algorithms. With the emergence of AI, the internet is on a historic edge. OpenAI and other big companies are in a crazy tournament to serve “the best” large language model (LLM) over the internet through APIs. Evaluating these LLMs is complex due to the complexity of evaluating models on different tasks and aggregation. Read the interview about PyCM's contribution to evaluating LLM's with its creators Sepand Haghighi, Arash Zolanvari & Sadra Sabouri.  https://lnkd.in/eRjXD7mh

"The 3 fundamental issues of the internet are: privacy, data security, and environmental impact", say Pedro Miranda, Artur Nóbrega & Jose T. de Sousa from the company IObundle. To address these issues they propose a reconfigurable hardware approach to encrypt and decrypt messages encoded in the post-quantum AES256, SHA256, and McEliece cryptosystems. This approach aims to increase the difficulty of cracking the keys, boost performance, while lowering power consumption. Read the interview: https://lnkd.in/enGqdP2R #FOSS #NGI0 #NGI

"Protecting private information is of utmost importance", say Kristina Sojakova & @Mihai Codescu of the IPDL project. But "most cryptographic algorithms we use to secure sensitive data are too complex for humans to verify." IPDL aims to give cryptographic researchers the tools for constructing formal security proofs for large message-passing cryptographic protocols. Such proofs increase the trustworthiness of cryptographic designs and the internet as a whole. https://lnkd.in/evSnYzG2 #NGI0 #NGI

Michiel de Jong is working on Federated Bookkeeping. The problem he sees with today's internet are applications offered by big tech companies which, among other things, lack proper interoperability. Michiel has been working on multiple projects which aim "to build open source prototypes of a more connected and distributed vision for internet applications, accompanied by protocol specifications and test suites [...]." Read the interview here: https://lnkd.in/eWQGQi8M #FOSS #NGI0 #NGI

With the project: 'Improving OpenSSH's Authentication and PKI', Wiktor Kwapisiewicz, David Runge & Doron Behar address the issue of initial trust in SSH. Most SSH users default to the “Trust On First Use” model, which leaves the 1st connection vulnerable to Man in the Middle attacks. Solving this problem securely but frictionlessly requires a Public Key Infrastructure. The project uses the OpenPGP PKI to authenticate the remote host. interview: https://lnkd.in/eRMmdmZu #FOSS #NGI0 #NGI

Two interviews about bootstrapping from source: the effort to reduce the reliance on large, unauditable binary blobs binary seeds in the bootstrap process of software distributions. In S01E02 of the NGI0 podcast titled 'Let's get rid of all the binary blobs' we talk to Janneke, founder of GNU Mes. [1] The project helped to significantly reduce the number & size of binary seeds used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0. And in the written interview with Ekaitz Zarraga he talks about bootstrapping 'Guix on RISC-V via GNU Mes' which brings the GNU Mes project to the rapidly growing ecosystem of RISC-V. [2] [1] https://lnkd.in/e69ES6eb [2] https://lnkd.in/eMTwf4va

"One of the critical issues is that the web is fundamentally centralised in some sense and grants too much power to its centralised components", says Jens Finkhäuser, founder of the Interpeer project. Based on an analyses of the existing web technology stack and alternative architectures, Interpeer has derived an alternative, human-centric architecture. To learn more about Interpeer read the entire interview here: https://lnkd.in/d5PUT6PD #FOSS #NGI0 #NGI

"When we use cloud-based apps, they’re not running on our computer or phone, right? We have just a client application that uses some kind of API to communicate with a platform", says Santiago Bazerque of Hyper Hyper Space. The project works on a local-first model in which everybody has a copy of an app's workspace on their device. "Everything in the model we’re proposing works this way. Instead of trusting a cloud platform, you need to trust your software, which, in our case, is open source and auditable by anyone." Read the entire interview here: https://lnkd.in/eGvWM5XP #FOSS #NGI0 #NGI #localfirst

We're trying something new: a podcast :). In the NGI0: Next Generation Internet podcast we talk to the people who are building a resilient, trustworthy and human-centered internet. In S01E01 our guest is Joep Meindertsma of Atomic Data. The issue he sees with today’s internet is the siloing of data. It leads to users being locked into Big Tech ecosystems and it's hard to reuse data. Joep explains how Atomic Data, a modular specification for sharing, modifying and modelling data, addresses this problem. You can listen to it on the open web and on a host of podcast platforms https://lnkd.in/eTW954QU #semanticweb #podcast #foss #NGI0 #NGI

Congratulations to the Monitoring Plugins team for winning the 4th BlueHats prize! Monitoring Plugins is a long lived project for keeping IT infrastructure running correctly. The plugins detect problematic statuses such as offline servers, high latency, overheating hardware or faulty storage. BlueHats is a €10.000 prize to honor maintainers and shine a light on their importance for free and open source software. The jury praised Monitoring Plugins for its important (but often unnoticed) contribution to monitoring IT infra: "This project is typical of a niche Free Software initiative that helps other tools to remain accurate". For more praise and the reaction of the Monitoring Plugins team see: https://lnkd.in/eTFSE7Zq The BlueHats prize is an initiative of the French public administration in to reward maintainers of critical Free Software that it uses. Its Free Software unit (an OSPO) has partnered with NLnet and selected 4 notable projects in 2024. For all 4 winners see: https://lnkd.in/edHXnuZr #FOSS #BlueHats #Maintenance