Tesla boss Elon Musk said in an interview late Sunday that a monkey has been wired up to play video games with its mind by a company he founded called Neuralink. CNBC reports: Neuralink put a computer chip into the monkey's skull and used "tiny wires" to connect it to its brain, Musk said. "It's not an unhappy monkey," he said during a talk on Clubhouse, a new social media app gaining popularity that allows people to have informal voice chats while others listen in. "You can't even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he's got a slight like dark mohawk."

The billionaire -- who also spoke about space travel, colonies on Mars, crypto, artificial intelligence and Covid-19 vaccines -- said Neuralink is trying to figure out if it can use its chips to get monkeys to play "mind Pong" with each other. "That would be pretty cool," said Musk, who is CEO of Neuralink, in addition to SpaceX and Tesla. Neuralink's team of around 100 people is trying to develop an implementable computer-brain interface. Musk describes it as a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go into your brain. [...] Musk said Neuralink will "probably" be releasing some videos that show the company's progress in the next month or so. Last August, Neuralink conducted a live demo of its technology on three pigs. A wireless link from the Neuralink device showed the pig's activity activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage.

Musk made the comments on the audio chat app Clubhouse, where he also grilled Robinhood CEO about what happened with GameStop.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In China's popular online-streaming industry, virtual gift-giving is big. You can send your favorite live performer anything from a rose for 5 yuan (80 cents) to a space rocket for 500 yuan. The present is just a symbol, but the money is real -- and that's what's made Kuaishou Technology so successful. [...] Co-founders Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao will each be worth more than $5.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Su, a native of China's central Hunan province, studied computer programming at the prestigious Tsinghua University before joining Google in Beijing in 2006. There, he earned about $23,000 annually, eight times the country's average salary back then. While he said he was "extremely happy," a stay in Silicon Valley inspired him to start his own business, according to Kuaishou's biography. The 38-year-old quit Google during the global financial crisis to start his own video-advertising venture, which didn't come to fruition. After a short stint with Baidu Inc., he got acquainted with Cheng in 2011 and they soon decided to pair up. In 2013, the duo transformed the Kuaishou app from a GIF-maker to the social-video platform it is today, initially gaining popularity with its videos of life in rural China.

With the rise of ByteDance's Douyin, the Chinese twin app of TikTok, Kuaishou broadened its appeal, luring influencers backed by talent agencies and pop stars like Taiwan's Jay Chou. Along the way, it sped up monetization by creating ad slots and in-app stores for brands and merchants. While virtual gift purchases are still its bread and butter -- they make up almost two-thirds of its revenue -- the company is delving deeper into higher-margin businesses like e-commerce and online gaming. Its sales rose almost 50% to 40.7 billion yuan in the first nine months of last year, according to the IPO prospectus.

In Apple and Epic's ongoing court battle over App Store fees, one of the key sticking points has been Apple's insistence on maintaining a 30 percent cut as a cornerstone of the storefront. But newly revealed Apple executive emails from the case show that the App Store rules that Apple flouts as essential to the fairness of the app economy were carefully negotiated into existence over time in a way that ensured Apple wasn't "leaving money on the table." From a report: The emails date back to a 2011 discussion, which included Apple software and services leader Eddy Cue, around how Apple would handle subscription video applications on the Apple TV -- an important conversation, given the rise in popularity of streaming services. And while the discussion doesn't offer much insight on Apple's existing 30 percent fee for the App Store, it does reveal how malleable those rules were when it came to maximizing profit. The company examined a variety of options, including a 40 percent one-time cut, a 30 percent one-time cut, a 30 percent ongoing fee, or more individualized deals with services like the NBA and MLB.

In March Andrew Yang's nonprofit gave $1,000 one-time grants to a thousand residents in the Bronx. This week a new article in the New Yorker asks one of those grant recipients how they feel about Yang's newest proposal as he runs to be New York's mayor: to give the city's public-housing residents billions of dollars in a "Borough Bucks" currency that would hopefully recirculate in the community: "I was like, you know, am I the only person here that would love to live in a society where we can actually barter our talents and skills, instead of depending on this economy that's not working for us?"

Yang made a similar point when I asked him about the origins of the Borough Bucks proposal. "If you're going to invest resources in a community, your preference is that the resources circulate within the community, particularly if you can serve multiple goals," he said. "They're just imaginative ways for communities to unlock resources."
The article also notes that in an earlier run for the U.S. presidency, "his pitch was that the economy needed to be modernized to account for automation and other technological advances. In his mayoral run, his pitch is that New York City should become the 'anti-poverty' city." But they explored the larger question of whether Yang sees a growing acceptance for universal basic incomes: I asked Yang about the debate, now happening in Congress, about whether Biden should push for fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks in the next bailout package, or two-thousand-dollar checks, or two thousand dollars a month until the economy rebounds. Yang said that he favored the last proposal.

I asked him how he felt about the fact that even as other candidates in the race were attacking him, several — Eric Adams, the former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and the City Council member Carlos Menchaca — had expressed interest in the U.B.I. policies he had championed. "I would love to check out their plans," Yang said. "It's an idea whose time has come. I'm certainly very proud to have contributed to the idea's popularity, but anyone who wants to adapt a version of it, like, fantastic."

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year-old history last week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with more than 100 million user search queries. From a report: The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google's 5 billion daily search queries but it's a positive sign that users are looking for alternatives. DuckDuckGo's popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own site and now currently offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension. More than 4 million users installed these apps and extension, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.

According to founder and CEO Pavel Durov, Telegram gained 25 million new users in the last 72 hours as it smashed past the 500 million active monthly user mark. Android Police reports: For comparison, the app averaged around 1.5 million new users per day in 2020, which was impressive enough already. Durvov says that this is down to his company's simple privacy and security promise, above all else.

The bulk of the new users are coming from Asia (38%), Europe (27%), and Latin America (21%), with around 8% signing up from the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa). Although not explicitly noted in Durov's post, there is likely a good number of Parler orphans joining Telegram -- although there are differences between the functions of the two apps, there's talk that former Parler users are heading to encrypted messaging apps in search of a more private platform. Signal has seen a similar rise in popularity for the same reason.

Programming columnist Mike Melanson describes the announcement of this year's programming language of the year: The TIOBE Index, the somewhat dubious ranking of programming language popularity according to search engine results, has announced its yearly proclamation of "language of the year," with the award going to Python for the fourth time in its history [more than any other programming language].

The title, the project leads write, "is awarded to the programming language that has gained most popularity in one year," with Python moving up 2.01% in 2020, which they attribute to "the ease of learning the language and its high productivity," alongside its numerous use cases.
C++ "is a very close runner up" for programming language of the year, TIOBE tells us, "with an increase of 1.99%. Other winners are C (+1.66%), Groovy (+1.23%) and R (+1.10%)...

"What else happened in the TIOBE index in 2020? C has become number 1 again, beating Java. Java lost almost 5% in only 1 year."

More than three million internet users are believed to have installed 15 Chrome, and 13 Edge extensions that contain malicious code, reports ZDNet, citing an announcement from cybersecurity company Avast: Avast researchers said they believe the primary objective of this campaign was to hijack user traffic for monetary gains. "For every redirection to a third party domain, the cybercriminals would receive a payment," the company said.

Avast said it discovered the extensions last month and found evidence that some had been active since at least December 2018, when some users first started reporting issues with being redirected to other sites. Jan Rubín, Malware Researcher at Avast, said they couldn't identify if the extensions had been created with malicious code from the beginning or if the code was added via an update when each extension passed a level of popularity. And many extensions did become very popular, with tens of thousands of installs. Most did so by posing as add-ons meant to help users download multimedia content from various social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, or Spotify.

Avast said it reported its findings to both Google and Microsoft and that both companies are still investigating the extensions.
ZDNet's article includes Avast's lists of the 28 extensions which they're recommending be uninstalled by users.

ZDNet also notes that "A day after Avast published its findings, only three of the 15 Chrome extensions were removed, while all the Edge add-ons were still available for download. A source familiar with the investigation told ZDNet that Microsoft has not been able to confirm the Avast report."

Gardeners in Hampshire, a county in southeast England, were weeding their yard in April when they found 63 gold coins and one silver coin from King Henry VIII's reign in the 16th century, with four of the coins inscribed with the initials of the king's wives Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour. From a report: The archaeological find was one of more than 47,000 in England and Wales that were reported this year, amid an increase in backyard gardening during coronavirus lockdowns, the British Museum said on Wednesday. In another discovery, in Milton Keynes, a town northwest of London, gardeners found 50 solid gold South African Krugerrand coins that were minted in the 1970s during apartheid. The news of the archaeological finds came as the British government said last week that it planned to broaden its definition of what constitutes a treasure so that more rare artifacts -- not just ones made of gold or silver, or that were more than 300 years old -- could be preserved for display in museums rather than sold to private collectors.

In Britain, many historical objects that are found and believed to be from the 18th century or earlier must by law be reported to local officials for review. If the object meets the government's definition of treasure, national or local museums have the option to acquire it and pay a reward, equivalent to the market value of the object, that is split between the finder and the landowner. Since 1997, the law in most of Britain has defined as treasure, and thus protected, objects that are made of gold or silver and are more than 300 years old, from before mass production began with the Industrial Revolution. But as the growing popularity of metal detecting as a hobby meant that more historical objects were being found, museums have missed out on items of archaeological significance that did not fall within the law's definition, including Bronze Age axes, Iron Age caldrons, and medieval weapons and jewelry.

GitHub has released its annual Octoverse report, revealing trends in one of the largest developer communities on the planet, including a spike in open source project activity following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. VentureBeat: JavaScript continues to be the most popular programming language on GitHub, while Python is now the second most popular, followed by Java and the fast-growing TypeScript community. Maintained by GitHub owner Microsoft, TypeScript has climbed from seventh place in 2018 and 2019 to fourth overall this year. PHP and Ruby, languages that ranked among the most popular five years ago, continued to decline in popularity.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Rifle fire, hurried footsteps and distant explosions. The rat-a-tat of a firefight. Cars mangled from grenades. The young man was transfixed. It could have been any day in Kabul, where targeted assassinations, terrorist attacks and wanton violence have become routine, and the city often feels as if it is under siege. But for Safiullah Sharifi, his behind firmly planted on a dusty stoop in the Qala-e Fatullah neighborhood, the death and destruction unfurled on his phone, held landscape-style in his hands. "On Friday I play from early morning to around 4 p.m.," said Mr. Sharifi, 20, with a sly grin, as if he knew he was detailing the outline of an addiction to a passer-by. His left hand is tattooed with a skull in a jester's hat, a grim image offset by his lanky and not-quite-old-enough demeanor. "Almost every night, it's 8 p.m. to 3 a.m."

The game is called PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds, but to its millions of players worldwide, no matter the language, it's referred to as PUBG (pronounced pub-gee). It's violent. And it's becoming widely played across Afghanistan, almost as an escape from reality as the 19-year-old war grinds on. In the game, the player drops onto a large piece of terrain, finds weapons and equipment and kills everyone, all of whom are other people playing the game against each other. Victory translates to being the last person or team standing. Which makes its growing popularity in Afghanistan peculiar since that can eerily almost describe the state of the war -- despite ongoing peace negotiations in Qatar.

Even as ending that war seems ever more elusive, Afghan lawmakers are trying to ban PUBG, arguing that it promotes violence and distracts the young from their schoolwork. But Mr. Sharifi laughed at the mention of the proposed ban, knowing he could circumvent it easily with software on his phone. He said he uses the game to communicate with friends and sometimes talks to girls who also play it. That is a remarkable feat on its own since only in the last several years have Afghanistan's cell networks become capable of delivering the kind of data needed to play a game like PUBG, let alone communicate with people concurrently. Gaming centers became popular in Kabul in the years after the 2001 United States invasion, which reversed the Taliban's ban on entertainment including video games and music. But PUBG and other mobile games are usurping these staples because they are downloadable on a smartphone, and free, in a country where 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A new study shows that the demand for employee surveillance software was up 55% in June 2020 compared to the pre-pandemic average. From webcam access to random screenshot monitoring, these surveillance software products can record almost everything an employee does on their computer. VPN review website Top10VPN used its global monitoring data to analyze over 200 terms related to employee surveillance software. It took into account both generic and brand-specific queries for its study which compared searches during March-May 2020 with internet searches in the preceding year. Global demand for employee monitoring software increased by 108% in April, and 70% in May 2020 compared with searches carried out the preceding year. Queries for "How to monitor employees working from home" increased by 1,705% in April and 652% in May 2020 compared with searches carried out the preceding year.

The surge in popularity of such an open-ended phrase like this reveals how unprepared many companies were for the abrupt shift to mass home-working. The most popular surveillance tools are Time Doctor, Hubstaff, and FlexiSPY. The tools with the biggest increase in demand include Teramind, DeskTime, Kickidler, and Time Doctor, with interest for the latter tripling compared to the pre-pandemic levels. The top three tools account for almost 60% of global demand in surveillance software because of the range of features offered. The radical shift away from office-working has clearly made employers nervous about a reduction in productivity and its potential impact on their business. Greater surveillance, however, may actually reduce long-term productivity. Your boss watching your every move may make you less productive in the long run and could significantly impact your feelings about the company itself.

"The rising popularity of alternative social media app Parler is raising concerns over the spread of misinformation and potential for radicalizing users on a platform that's taken a hands-off approach to regulating content," reports The Hill's reporter on technology policy: The app has been boosted by conservatives, surging since Election Day, as Republicans amp up allegations of anti-conservative bias from social media giants like Twitter and Facebook that have clamped down on pro-Trump election misinformation. Experts warn that a total lack of content moderation could prove harmful beyond creating political echo chambers and further spreading conspiracy theories. "Anytime you take a laissez faire approach to moderation — you say, 'anything goes' right up until actual threats of real world violence — that creates a huge space for some really problematic things to happen," said Bret Schafer, a fellow focusing on disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy....

For those who have abandoned Twitter and Facebook in favor of Parler, it could create a new dynamic on the mainstream social media platforms. "The idea that these people are leaving those platforms and no longer trying to red pill individuals to see their conspiracy theories on large platforms like Facebook and Twitter, I think that's a good thing," said Jason Blazakis, director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute. He added that the shift to Parler could mean fewer people on Facebook and Twitter are "exposed to these ideas," and "migrating to more obscure platforms" may ultimately result in a smaller audience for misinformation....

Unchecked content also risks exploitation of misinformation by foreign actors, much like it did on U.S. social media platforms in 2016, said Saif Shahin, an assistant professor at American University's School of Communications. But he said Parler's success underscores that misinformation in the U.S. is now fundamentally a domestic problem.

"We have people in this country divided so sharply along partisan lines that they actively are seeking what we consider to be disinformation, but what they consider just one type of information," Shahin said. "It is a domestic problem, a social problem, within American society."
Long-time Slashdot reader shilly also shared a thread on Twitter from entrepreneur/activist Dave Troy (currently a TedX organizer) raising questions about Parler's funding. [UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has now reported that Parler's backers include Robert Mercer and his daughter, "who have not disclosed their involvement," and who previously funded Cambridge Analytica.]

Troy also asserted that "a preliminary analysis of the first several thousand accounts on Parler shows that it is the usual Russia-aligned operatives that we in this space have tracked for years. This is a large-scale op aligned with Russian interests."

Within hours Russia's state-controlled media outlet "Russia Today" had published an article calling Troy an "unhinged conspiracy theorist."

For the first time in the history of TIOBE's index, Java has slipped out of the top two, leaving Python to occupy the spot behind reigning champion, C. TechRepublic reports: October's TIOBE index had C at No. 1 and Java at No. 2, and historically those two languages have simply traded spaces while the rest of the competition battled it out for the privilege to fall in behind the two perennial leaders. With Python finally overtaking Java in popularity, the future could be one in which everything comes up Python. "In the past, most programming activities were performed by software engineers. But programming skills are needed everywhere nowadays and there is a lack of good software developers," TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen said. "As a consequence, we need something simple that can be handled by non-software engineers, something easy to learn with fast edit cycles and smooth deployment. Python meets all these needs."

Jansen said that he believes this is the case despite claims from others that Python's popularity is due to booms in data mining, AI, numerical computing, and other initiatives that commonly use Python's extensive data processing capabilities. As TechRepublic's R. Dallon Adams wrote in his piece on the October index, Python has been giving Java a run for its money for some time. October saw Python at No. 3 with the largest year-over-year growth percentage in the top 50 languages. Java, still at second place in October, had the largest negative year-over-year growth rate in the top 50 during the same period. R, Perl, and Go are also all boasting positive growth. "R is in 9th place, the same it occupied last month," reports TechRepublic. "R has experienced explosive growth in 2020, which has led TIOBE to consider it a contender for programming language of the year."

An anonymous reader writes: Kite, which suggests code snippets for developers in real time, today added support for 11 more programming languages, bringing its total to 13. In addition to Python and JavaScript, Kite's AI-powered code completions now support TypeScript, Java, HTML, CSS, Go, C, C#, C++, Objective C, Kotlin, and Scala. (The team chose the 11 languages by triangulating the StackOverflow developer survey, Redmonk's language rankings, and its own developer submissions.) AI that helps developers is growing in popularity, with startups like DeepCode offering AI-powered code reviews and tech giants like Microsoft trying to apply AI to the entire application developer cycle. Kite stands out from the pack with 350,000 monthly developers using its AI developer tool. Kite debuted privately in April 2016 before publicly launching a cloud-powered developer sidekick in March 2017. The company raised $17 million in January 2019 and ditched the cloud to run its free offering locally. In May, Kite added JavaScript support, launched a Pro plan with advanced line-of-code completions for Python, and updated its engine to use deep learning, a type of machine learning.

Python has reached "a new all-time high" on TIOBE's index of programming language popularity. TechRadar reports: Java's days as the world's second most popular programming language could be numbered according to Tiobe's latest programming language rankings which show Python is becoming increasingly popular among developers. The firm's Index for October 2020 shows that Java has been overtaken by C as the world's most popular programming language when compared to the same period last year. Python remains in third place but it's quickly closing the gap between it and Java. According to Tiobe CEO Paul Jensen, C and Java have held the top two spots consistently for the past two decades. However, the 25-year-old programming language Java is approaching its "all time low" in popularity as it has fallen by 4.32 percentage points when compared to where it stood in October of last year. Tiobe ranks programming languages in its popularity index based on the number of hits each language gets across 25 search engines.
RedMonk's rankings already show Python as more popular than Java — the first time since 2012 that Java isn't one of their top two most popular languages. And TIOBE's CEO says "Let's see what will happen the next few months."

Here's their October rankings for the top 10 most popular programming languages.

• C
• Java
• Python
• C++
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• PHP
• R
• SQL

And coming in at #11 is Perl.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: France has introduced a new law to protect young social media stars. The legislation aims to regulate the hours under-16s can work online and what happens to their earnings. It also enshrines the right to be forgotten, meaning that platforms will be obliged to take down content on the child's request. The popularity of child influencers has grown rapidly in recent years, with a number of young names appearing on the list of YouTube's top earners. The change will make France a pioneer in the rights of child social media stars, the MP behind the bill, Bruno Studer, was quoted as saying by Le Monde newspaper.

The new law, which was passed unanimously on Tuesday, does not affect all children who appear on social media, but instead targets those who spend significant amounts of time working online and whose work generates an income. The change offers them the same protections as those given to child models and actors in France, with their earnings placed in a bank account until they turn 16. Companies wishing to employ child influencers must also receive permission from local authorities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: After the pandemic closed many libraries' physical branches this spring, checkouts of ebooks are up 52 percent from the same period last year, according to OverDrive, which partners with 50,000 libraries worldwide. Hoopla, another service that connects libraries to publishers, says 439 library systems in the US and Canada have joined since March, boosting its membership by 20 percent. Some public libraries, new to digital collections, delight in exposing their readers to a new kind of reading. The library in Archer City, Texas, population 9,000, received a grant to join OverDrive this summer. The new ebook collection "has really been wonderful," says library director Gretchen Abernathy-Kuck. "So much of the last few months has been stressful and negative." The ebooks are "something positive. It was something new."

But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry's big-five publishers -- Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan -- have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time -- two years, for example -- or number of checkouts -- most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period. The result: Libraries typically pay between $20 and $65 per copy -- an industry average of $40, according to one recent survey -- compared with the $15 an individual might pay to buy the same ebook online. Instead of owning an ebook copy forever, librarians must decide at the end of the licensing term whether to renew. The publishers' licensing terms make it "very difficult for libraries to be able to afford ebooks," says Michelle Jeske, director of the Denver Public Library and president of the Public Library Association. "The pricing models don't work well for libraries."

"Librarians argue that digital lending promotes sales in the long run, by introducing readers to authors whose books they might not have bought otherwise," reports Wired. Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, the project leader for the Panorama Project, adds: "I think one of the things we'll see in the postmortem of this year is that the importance of libraries is going to stand out. Any publisher that gets out of 2020 not missing their budgets too much -- they're going to owe that to libraries."

ZDNet reports: Oracle has released version 15 of Java, the language created 25 years ago by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, which Oracle snapped up in 2009 for about $7.4bn to gain what it said was the "most important software Oracle has ever acquired". Java 15, or Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 15, brings the Edwards-Curve digital signature algorithm, hidden classes, and former preview features that have been finalized, including text blocks, and the Z Garbage Collector, while the sealed-classes feature arrives and pattern matching and records emerge as a second preview...

In July, Java fell out of RedMonk's top two positions for the first time since 2012 and now resides behind JavaScript and Python in terms of popularity. Tiobe in September ranked Java in second position, behind C and ahead of Python.... But Java is still hugely popular and widely used in the enterprise, according to Oracle, which notes it is used by over 69% of full-time developers worldwide... It counts Arm, Amazon, IBM, Intel, NTT Data, Red Hat, SAP and Tencent among its list of notable contributors to JDK 15. Oracle also gave a special mention to Microsoft and cloud system monitoring service DataDog for fixes...

As part of Java's 25th anniversary, Oracle commissioned analyst firm Omdia to assess its six-month release strategy for Java and whether it would be enough to keep millions of Java developers away from memory-safe alternatives such as Kotlin, the language Google has endorsed for Android development, and Rust, a system programming language that was created at Mozilla. "In Omdia's opinion, the work Oracle began a few years ago in moving to a six-month update cycle and introducing a new level of modularity, puts the vendor in good stead with its constituency of approximately 12 million developers," Oracle said in its report on Omdia's analysis.

"However, Oracle and the Java programming language need an ongoing series of innovative, must-have, and 'delightful' features that make the language even more user friendly and cloud capable. These will keep existing Java developers happy while steering potential Java developers away from newer languages like Rust and Kotlin."

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185), shares some thoughts from long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We'd like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That's another matter... Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project's popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites — and their methodologies — have flaws.
The article looks at a variety of attempts, including freshmeat.net; Eric Raymond's attempt to revive Freecode; GitHub's star (which Docker's co-founder calls a "bullshit metric"); Synopsys's Black Duck Open Hub (formerly Ohloh); and even Google Trends. But it wraps up by pointing out that Brian Profitt, Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager, is working with others on "Project CHAOSS," a new Linux Foundation project to make it easy to evaluate open-source projects.
This pulled together Grimoirelab and similar programs, such as Augur and Red Hat's own Prospector... Its metrics include what kinds of contributions are being made; when the contributions are made; and who's making the contributions. All of which are vital to understanding the overall health of a project.

CHAOSS is still a work in progress. Its official release is scheduled for February 2021... Ultimately, this data will be available to all, from end users to the project leads. "In fact, I hope this happens a lot, because we can refine our models more quickly," says Profitt.