Before opening a new round in autumn 2019, Mozilla has informed the open source community about the results of its research grant programme for the first half of the year. The programme was started to support universities, labs, and research-focused, registered non-profits that research technology relevant to the company and other endeavours aiming “to make the internet a better place”.

Amongst the twelve projects that received funding are proposals that cover the impact of ad preference controls, performance and anonymity of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 in Tor, Access Control Interfaces for Wasmtime, and a decentralised open standard for a microdonation-supported web. Support was also granted to an initiative to bring the Julia programming language to the browser and one to benchmark generic functions in Rust.

Netlify starts server-side insights service

Web project automation platform Netlify has introduced its users to site analytics service Netlify Analytics. The new tool runs server-side which should reduce the impact of ad blockers and similar client-side tools, while making sure the speed of a site isn’t affected. Those interested can enable the service through their Netlify dashboard, so no configuration is needed on user-side. It will however set you back $9 per month and site.

Pony takes next hurdle on the way to v1.0

Open-source language Pony was recently released in version 0.29, which comes with changes to the way TCPConnection reads data to improve performance. Other than that users can now set a maximum buffer size for TCPConnection and apply AsioEvent to see if an event is a one-shot. A complete list of changes can be found in the release announcement.

Pony is a C-compatible, type and memory safe, ahead-of-time compiled programming language for high-performance, concurrent programs that has been in the works since 2014. It was open sourced in 2015 and is available on GitHub under the BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License.

ONAP gains popularity, releases Dublin

Open Network Automation Platform ONAP has reached its fourth major release, dubbed Dublin. The Linux Foundation project was started to work on an open but standards-driven architecture and implementation platform for instantiating and automating large-scale services and workloads, such as such as 5G, BBS, CCVPN, and vCPE. It is driven by a growing number of network and cloud operators as well as technology providers.

In version 4.0, ONAP has been fitted with a new connectivity blueprint demonstrating multi-gigabit residential connectivity over PON. It also saw the addition of PNF support, performance management and extra monitoring capabilities to the 5G blueprint amongst other things.