WhiteSource is making its Vulnerability Checker available for free for developers to detect if their solutions contain any of the 50 most critical open-source bugs out there today. The checker will enable users to import and scan any library as well as check if their projects are susceptible to the most recent and common bugs.

“With our new Vulnerability Checker, we can provide everyone — from our largest enterprise customers to young developers — quick and accurate data on their open source usage,” said David Habusha, VP of product at WhiteSource. “This new tool is a great way for us to enable all developers to leverage the open source data continuously collected by the WhiteSource database, giving them insight into their open source usage and empowering them with the critical open source security information that they need.”

In addition, the company announced the top 5 new vulnerabilities for July 2018, which included the Linux Kernel, cURL, Samba, Ansible and libpng. More information is available here.

Julia 1.0 now available
The Julia language has reached version 1.0. Julia was designed as a high-level dynamic programming language with the ability to compile native code for multiple platforms.

Version 1.0 of the language features a commitment to its API stability, making code written for 1.0 will continue to work in future versions, the team explained. Other new features the language introduces includes a built-in package manager, a new canonical presentation for missing values, ability to extend broadcasting to custom types, and named tuples.

More information is available here.

The Zephyr Project announces new growth
The open-source hosted Linux Foundation project, the Zephyr project, has announced new growth to its IoT ecosystem. The project announced support for more than 100 developer boards and the addition of six new members. New members include: Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University.

According to the team, when the project first launched in 2016, it only supported four boards. Today, it supports a variety of different boards and architectures with ARM, x86, ARC, NIOS II, XTENSA, and RISCV32 processor families.

“Developers have many choices when it comes to platforms. Zephyr offers the smallest memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends functionality of IoT devices,” said Anas Nashif, chair of the Zephyr Project Technical Steering Committee and a software engineer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Centre. “We are excited to welcome these member companies into our IoT ecosystem and look forward to collaborating with them to create and support a customizable, embedded open source platform.”

The Blockchain Learning Center
Codementor has announced a new center designed to help developers learn how to program with blockchain and keep up-to-date with the latest developments. The Blockchain Learning Center will provide a collection of curated resources including documentation, tutorials, frameworks, libraries, services and videos.

“Whether you’re new to blockchain or have some familiarity with it, we have posts that cover everything from the basics to in-depth technical tutorials. If you want to learn about blockchain programming and how it works, be sure to read the ‘What is Blockchain’ articles. Once you’re ready to dive in further, we’ve gathered the best blockchain and Solidity tutorials,” the website states.