In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the Mozilla's IoT gateway, a new machine learning platform, Code.mil's revamp, and more.
Open source news roundup for February 4-17, 2018Mozilla announces Project Things for a more secure IoT
Mozilla wants you to have control over your connected devices. To help you gain that control, they've released Project Things into the wild[1].
Project Things is a Raspberry Pi-powered gateway that gives "connected things their own Things URLs so they can be discovered and linked to." People using Project Things can issue voice commands to their devices, get a "a floor-plan map of devices in the home," and build complex commands using a rules engine inspired by a service called IFTTT[2]. And that's just the beginning.
You can get started with Project Things by downloading it[3] and running it on your Raspberry Pi. Mozilla cautions that it's an "early preview for hackers, makers and web developers."
Hardware hackers get Linux to run on Nintendo Switch
Linux now runs on yet another piece of hardware that wasn't designed to play nicely with the operating system. The hardware hacking group fail0verflow got Debian to run on the Nintendo Switch portable gaming console[4].
To do the deed, fail0verflow took advantage of a flaw in the device's boot ROM to insert code into the boot process that allows Linux to run on the Switch. The group did it without "custom modifications or chips which has often been the case with such 'jailbreaking' of games consoles." fail0verflow hasn't release the details of this hack, but if they do "we could see hobbyist hackers get Linux up and running on their Switches