The GitHub Blog

This month, we're introducing two new apps to help you monitor your APIs and improve productivity by measuring team dynamics. Head over to GitHub Marketplace to discover new tools for building better software.

REST API monitoring

Moesif provides real-time visibility into your live API traffic with advanced analytics so you never miss a beat. Analyze customer usage on your API and deeply understand every error, and prevent minor issues from becoming major outages through passive monitoring of your live API traffic. You can even recieve automatic alerts to API problems with integrations for Slack and PagerDuty.

Measuring team dynamics

DeepAffects is an emotional analytics application for managers and team leads to get issue-level insights that improve team dynamics and productivity. DeepAffects analyzes emotional queues and tones in issue descriptions and comments to help identify high-resolution time issues or disagreements within teams. Monitor and measure happiness, trust, and conflicts among team members to determine overall impact on projects. DeepAffects provides you with information that can help you build and organize higher performing teams.

Ready to try out these new additions? See how they can help your team work better or discover even more tools in GitHub Marketplace.

Now it’s even easier to connect GitHub Enterprise to your continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) tools with our latest integration from Codeship—a simple cloud-based CI/CD platform with native Docker support.

Support your organization’s security policies without taking on any of the overhead of managing CI/CD servers or a locally installed instance of Codeship. With the new integration, you can host code on your private GitHub instance, while builds will run in the cloud on Codeship's build machines—private, single-tenant machines that never store your code. You'll get the same experience cloud services always provide with the flexibility to support more enterprise-level workflows and private source control. You can also expect finely-tuned permissions and restricted IP ranges from Codeship in the coming months.

Try it out today, and stay tuned for more integrations that bring together your favorite software development tools.

Connect GitHub and Codeship

Get a more complete overview of how each of your projects is going. Now you'll see a progress bar that tracks the to do, in progress, and done cards and visualizes the progress of each of your projects.

With this update, you can also track project boards from other repositories and organizations with more context. Enter the URL of any project on GitHub into the note field to create a project summary card—a detail card like the recently released issue summary cards. Your existing cards will update automatically, so there's no need to manually upgrade your project boards.

Check out the documentation to learn more about tracking your project's progress, including how to disable tracking for long-running projects and other boards you'd prefer not to track.

Thousands of game developers from all over the world participated in Game Off, our fifth annual game jam celebrating open source. The theme this year was throwback, and jammers created over 200 games from infinite runners and retro flight simulators to old school Game Boy and LCD Games.

This year, participants rated games based on six criteria–overall, gameplay, graphics, audio, innovation and theme interpretation. Here are your 2017 winners plus a few staff favorites.

Overall winner and voted best gameplay - Daemon vs. Demon

► Play (Win, macOS) · Source (Godot, GDScript)

“Every swing looked and sounded meaningful, which made it super satisfying to play. I liked the darker tone of the graphics and music. ” - @AiriKarin

In Daemon vs Demon our hero has to slay rogue demons to be able to remain in the world of the living.

Best graphics - Neon Skylines

► Play (Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (Unity, C#)

“This game is sooooooo gooood I can't stop playing!” - @BonbonGit

Neon Skylines is an addictive retro arcade game with an 80s sci-fi look and feel. Fly through a procedurally generated neon world, and use your ability to slow down time to avoid crashing.

Best theme interpretation - COMMIT4

► Play (Web) · Source (Phaser, JavaScript)

“This was awesome, it felt just like the old LCD games I had growing up. The visuals and audio were on point.” - @sprngr

COMMIT4 is a digital LCD game where you take control of an Octocat and try to destroy incoming bugs trying to break your master branch.

Best innovation - Lazonyx

“A complete package! Truly unique and fun game :D” - @tahaali54

► Play (Windows, macOS, Linux) · Source (Godot, GDScript)

Lazonyx is a retro arcade-style 2D single-screen platformer with movable platforms. The goal is to shoot the enemies, and collect the rings that they drop. The rings needs to find their way to the collection point at the bottom of the screen.

Best audio - Heatwave

► Play (Web) · Source

“The graphics and music are amazing and it has outstanding gameplay! Well done!” - @securas

Relive the glory days of text based inventory management in Miami during the 80s.

Staff picks

That's just five games from over 200 that were created. Whatever your operating system or game genre preferences might be, we're sure you'll find something that'll capture your attention on the complete list. Here are a few of our favorites...

Throwback

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (Unity, C#)

“The music, graphics and feeling is amazing!” - @Sygmei

In Throwback you have to run and throw back trash cans into bisons that are in pursuit.

Dark Forest

► Play (Win, macOS) · Source (Unity, C#)

“Just an absolutely killer idea. Speaking of killer, this is really hard! But I'll for sure be playing this game until I can beat it.” - @patricfallon

In Dark Forest an evil spirit from the Dark Realm is invading the forest. Find and pass through the Dark Realm gate to fight it. Keys to the gate have been scattered across the forest and across the departing realms. Departing realms are parallel dimensions, each a step towards death.

Did you know: @progrium streamed and recorded the entire development of the game. Watch it on YouTube.

Glitcher

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (Unity, C#)

“Amazing work. Truly great idea and execution. Made me very nostalgic for my old Apple Classic.” - @patricfallon

Glitcher is a Tactical Espionage game where you play as a computer virus infiltrating an older operating system.

BAD VIBES

► Play (Win, macOS) · Source (C#)

“This is a good game! I've also made a video lets-play which is now live on YouTube.” - @ElkCloner

BAD VIBES pays homage to the first-person shooters from yesteryear. Run around a maze collecting keys and vaporizing all the baddies that get in your way.

Reinvent the Wheel

► Play (Win, macOS) · Source (Unity, C#)

“This is a hilarious and weirdly addictive game. Still have yet to beat 170, but one day I will make that magic 190 wheel!” - @patricfallon

Taking the theme 'throwback' to the extreme, Reinvent The Wheel takes you to the stone age for a chance to rewrite history! Fashion a wheel with the limited time and resources given to you, and challenge your friends to see who's invention will travel the farthest.

Vengeance

► Play (Web) · Source (Unity, C#)

“This was a really clever idea. I should have played easier on myself so I could have gotten farther, but no. Bullets everywhere.” - @gumballstudios

Vengeance is a game where the enemy is always as skilled as you are.

Can You Throw My Ball Back Please?

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (Unity, C#)

“I love these point and click adventures, reminds me of Monkey Island. I like how this starts off so simple then expands into more and more as you explore. Great game!” - @bal200

Can You Throw My Ball Back Please is a point and click adventure game in which you take control of Jeremy and help return a ball.

Kickpunch

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (Phaser, JavaScript)

“Nice! I had fun playing and reminded me of games I played as a youth! My daughter loved it as well.” - @strayvoltage

Kick. Punch. Move. Don't let your enemies surround you in this old school beat-'em-up game.

bmrng

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (Phaser, JavaScript)

“I love the simplicity! Also, the graphics, while minimal, are very stylish. The boomerang mechanic is really fun and satisfying paired with the sound effects. Great work!” - @travm

bmrng is a fun, casual game where you throw a boomerang to hit targets. Watch out for the pandas though!

Glitch

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (Unity, C#)

“Very cool! Actions have some great snap to them.” - @sctincman

Make your way through the last surviving sentient beings on earth. As they try to tear you to pieces. You play as a a Glitch who is obssesed with discovering the meaning of life.

Tricolors

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (JavaScript)

“Solid puzzle game, had me hooked immediately.” - @sprngr

TRICOLORS is a tiny puzzle game about blocks and colors inspired by Lights Out.

AntiPacMan

► Play (Web, Win, macOS, Linux) · Source (JavaScript)

“Gesture recognition was done amazingly. Well done and good job on the concept.” -
@strayvoltage

Roles are reversed. Gameplay turned upside down. Help defeat PAC-MAN by drawing symbols on your screen.

Badgun

► Play (Web) · Source (Phaser, JavaScript)

“Extremely well executed. Reminds me of Death Really which I played until my arrow keys caught fire.” - @I4N-T

Help BADGUN, the hard-boiled Hawaiian cop, get more money. Collect coins, avoid the obstacles, and watch out for the heavy traffic.

Thank you!

Thank you everyone who created, played and judged these amazing games! People all over the world are enjoying them, and hopefully the next generation of game developers or weekend hobbyists will be able to learn from the source code and inspire them to build something themselves.

If you enjoyed any of these games, why not leave a note for the creators on their game page? With any luck, development will continue, so don't hesitate to submit pull requests with bug fixes, new levels, and more.

Special thanks to our friends at itch.io for making this is our biggest, best, and funnest Game Off yet!

Happy holidays and see you next year!

It's time to celebrate a fresh round of releases from our community—many of them 1.0s! The open source projects in this month's Release Radar are supported by the Apache foundation and used by organizations like Alibaba, Spotify, and AWS. They can also help you build more efficient, beautiful, and robust projects.

Ant Design 3.0

Ant Design is an enterprise-class UI design language and React-based implementation used by Ant Financial, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and more.

After 20,000 stars and 60 contributions, they've released their 3.0 version. Their revamped color palette and new component design will leave you eager to update.

Watch their repository or get the full story on the 3.0 release.

Symfony 4.0.0

Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components and a PHP framework for web projects that can speed up the creation and maintenance of your web apps. Used by organizations like Spotify and Drupal, their 4.0 release should make Symfony even more efficient and easy to use. 4.0 also represents 70 percent less code and fewer files and automates the most common tasks.

Watch the repository or learn more about the updates.

Netlify CMS 1.0.0

Netlify is a CMS for Static Site Generators. Its slick new user experience will have you excited to get publishing.

In addition to the brand-new interface features, their docs have been completely overhauled for clarity and now include sample code snippets.

Watch the repository or check out the release notes.

MelonJS 5.0

MelonJS is an open source HTML5 game engine that helps developers and designers focus on their games. Developers can use the popular tiled map format to easily bootstrap mechanics and levels.

And if you’re new to MelonJS, there tutorials and templates like Space Invaders and Platformer to get you started

Check out their repository or learn more about the latest release.

MXNet 1.0.0

MXNnet is a flexible and efficient library for deep learning that just released their full-fledged 1.0. The latest updates include performance improvements and a robust set of language-specific examples. The team just joined the Apache Incubator program, and we can’t wait to see what’s next for them!

Browse their repository or check out the latest enhancements.

ONNX 1.0

ONNX is an open standard for deep learning tools to interoperate, bolstering innovation in the AI community. Their 1.0 release with partners like Facebook, Microsoft, and AWS hopes to foster an open ecosystem for AI.

Visit their repository or read the AWS launch post.

Like what you see? Check out new projects from our Release Radars in September and October.

With issues like net neutrality and digital news curation in headlines every day, we’re seeing the effects of the growing role that technology has in our lives more than ever. From how we educate our children about new tools to how we decide to regulate internet service providers, we have a set of vitally important questions in front of us. To answer these questions, we’ll need a meeting of the minds—one that brings together the perspectives of government officials, business owners, developers, and citizens from all over the world. This global discussion is the only way we’ll progress toward appropriate solutions and the right balance in refocusing technology on humans. Here are four trends that will shape that discussion next year and beyond:

Net neutrality and the rise of technology populism

We haven’t seen major changes to internet regulation since 1996, when Congress passed legislation that sought to protect infant internet service providers from perceived risks to a “free internet” like the Communications Decency Act. Twenty years later, we’re seeing—and will continue to see—the pendulum shift from internet company exceptionalism and protectionism to greater control and regulation. In 2017, we saw massive changes to net neutrality, service provider immunities, and increased scrutiny on security and privacy issues. Next year, approximately four billion people will be internet users, many of them so-called “digital natives”, with different and evolving expectations for their online personhood. We should expect digital populism to gain steam alongside traditional party populism and to become a standard feature of mainstream politics, reflecting a broader cultural rise in consumer awareness regarding data privacy, security, and the ubiquitous role of technology in our day-to-day lives.

A new world of platform governance

With a greater push for regulation and increased awareness among consumers about how their data is used, we can expect to see a rise in policy standardization and transparency in how platforms govern themselves and their users. This shift is vital if internet service providers hope to continue to “regulate themselves.” Imagine a world in which there are standard policies companies could redline diff against. Now imagine as-yet-to-be-founded companies that could displace primary movers in search, social networking, or online retail spaces based on their more consumer-friendly data collection, security, or privacy practices.

Tech policy goes global

Regulators in Europe, China, and elsewhere are increasingly setting the agenda on issues ranging from data protection to cybersecurity and AI. Their decisions will set the tone on where—and how quickly—the U.S. will net out on flipping traditional dynamics on their head. These are some of the most important topics of our time, and we have a moral imperative to keep fighting for net neutrality and other policies that keep the internet open to innovation and competition. The consequences of not doing so could be devastating to the developer ecosystem.

Open source goes local

Expect to see major open source initiatives at the city and municipal level. Not only is this essential to government transparency, but it’s also an important way to recruit engineering talent, which has historically been challenging for local government organizations. This trend has been building for years, especially in Europe, and through collaborations like Code for America. In 2017, the centrality of mayors as leaders for the common good was recognized. In 2018, tech policy will be firmly added to their portfolios. Additionally, look for an increase in public sector investment to incentivize more people to become developers.

However these conversations evolve, we’ll be following along closely and speaking up when they affect our community.

Today is the second Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality this year, and there’s never been a more important time to show your support. GitHub is joining a number of companies, digital rights groups, and nonprofits to continue the fight for net neutrality rules and the rights of internet users around the world. This coordinated effort comes just a couple of days before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to vote on Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal that will likely end a free and open internet for all of us.

We began this week observing that just last year, the United Nation’s Human Rights Council recognized internet access as integral to promoting human rights and called on governments to promote digital literacy, facilitate access, and address digital divides.

Unfortunately, Pai’s proposal will reverse this progress—especially efforts to increase access and decrease divides—for developers and every internet user.

Why net neutrality matters

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn put it best when she explained that the proposal “threatens innovation at the edge, by allowing broadband providers to charge tolls to access their customers.” While concerns may center on how this affects the sites we rely on daily for searching and streaming, these changes will likely have a much greater impact on software entrepreneurs who are rewriting the way we communicate and get work done right now. The FCC is not considering the developers and small startups that don’t have access to the resources that bigger companies have.

In addition to charging internet users extra fees, broadband providers would be able to use preferential treatment for their own content. Even if developers and startups manage to pay the fees, internet providers could limit or block those services in favor of their own—robbing internet users of newer, more innovative ones.

As EveryoneOn, a U.S. nonprofit committed to creating social and economic opportunity by getting people online, notes “Lack of access to digital opportunity is particularly harmful today because of the role that digital technology plays in everyday tasks.” Its CEO Chike Aguh goes on to explain how net neutrality will have a broader economic impact: “90 percent of people in the United States who have looked for a new job in the last two years used the internet to research jobs, and 84 percent have applied to a job online.” EveryoneOn estimates that the internet results in more than $2 million in additional lifetime earnings for individuals with access.

A U.S. vote with global impact

As the U.S. prepares for another round of net neutrality debates, governing bodies in regions like India and the European Union have come out in support of net neutrality regulations. For instance, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released its recommendations on net neutrality this past November. These recommendations stem from TRAI’s acceptance that strong principles of non-discriminatory access will promote future growth and innovation of “internet infrastructure and its applications, content, and services.”

Additionally, the European Union has continued to evangelize its position on net neutrality. Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications Chair, Sebastien Soriano, explained in a recent speech that Europe’s position on net neutrality is established and drew a distinction between Europe and the U.S. by stating, “Even in the U.S., a pioneer country in this area, the issue remains unresolved.”

In jurisdictions that haven’t made a firm commitment to net neutrality, the change in U.S. policy could be used as justification for closed internet policy.

Make your voice heard

Net neutrality affects everyone, and we only have two more days to “Break the internet”, and let Congress know how we feel.

Call your U.S. congressperson today

If you’re not in the U.S., you can still help by spreading the word, and learning about open internet policies in your country.

GitHub Enterprise 2.12 has arrived with new organization tools to help your team stay focused and do their best work. Get project board enhancements, global webhooks, repository archiving, and more by upgrading to our latest release.

Ready to upgrade?
Download GitHub Enterprise 2.12

More accessible project management

Project boards help you keep track of what’s happening with a group of tasks. Now, with automation events, you can let your project boards update the status of your tasks for you. Whether you or a teammate add a new card to a project, close an issue, or merge a pull request, your cards will automatically move between columns in real time.

Learn more about project board automation

If you rely on assistive technology or prefer using the keyboard to manage project boards, you can now use our new keyboard shortcuts to quickly navigate between cards and columns. Simple keystrokes allow you to move cards and columns anywhere on the board, commit changes, or review the keyboard shortcuts in more detail.

Learn more about project navigation

Project boards are a great way to organize tasks, but often, those tasks have external dependencies. With our new Enterprise release, you can use notes to add links to those dependencies. When you reference an issue or pull request in a note, you’ll now see a preview of the cross-referenced link in a summary card, giving you more context.

Learn more about project note summary cards

Global webhooks that keep you in the know

Now you can configure webhooks for an entire enterprise instance instead of one repository or organization at a time. Admins will be notified about new users and organizations, deleted users and organizations, and membership changes.

Learn more about global webhooks

Better repository organization tools

You don’t have to delete repositories when they're inactive. Now you can archive older projects to make them read-only to owners and contributors. While no one will be able to add new issues, pull requests, or comments, you'll be clutter-free and still have access to the repositories if you decide to iterate on them later.

Learn more about archiving repositories

With Enterprise 2.12, you can also search for repositories by their license using license family names or queries like “license:mit” and “license:gpl-3.0”. License searching gives you another way to find projects that fit your licensing requirements or repos you’d like to work on. We’ve even added a license filter on the “Advanced Search” page to help you craft the exact query you need.

Learn more about searching repositories by license

Automatic HTTPS deployment

GitHub Enterprise now supports Let’s Encrypt, a public Certificate Authority (CA), which automatically obtains and renews TLS and SSL certificates. Admins can get a secure “green HTTPS padlock” by running a simple CLI command or requesting a TLS certificate in the Management Console, with no fees or manual steps for certificate renewal.

Learn more about HTTPS deployment

Additional Updates

• Use hotpatching to schedule patch upgrades during a designated upgrade window
• Get geo-replication improvements like updated commands, archive generation, and support for GitHub Pages
• View edit history for comments, use Markdown for topic discussions, and support new contributors with a contribution guidelines sidebar
• Configure permissions around a repository fork
• User-level requests for moves from child teams to parent teams

Upgrade today

Download GitHub Enterprise 2.12 to start using these tools. You can also check out the release notes to see what else is new or enable update checks to automatically check for the latest GitHub Enterprise release.

Not using GitHub Enterprise yet?
Request a 45-day free trial

Before your 2018 calendar fills up, start planning your trip to Barcelona on March 8 for Git Merge—an event dedicated to the developer community's favorite version control tool. Whether you're new to Git or built a company around it, you'll walk away with connections and ideas that can help you get to the next step. Tickets are on sale now, and we're taking Git Merge speaker submissions until January 20!

Speak at Git Merge

If you have a 30-minute session idea, we'd love to hear it. While Git Merge sessions are usually technical, we're looking for a wide range of topics and presenters—don't let a lack of technical (or speaking) experience stop you from submitting a proposal. If selected, you'll receive tickets to Git Merge events, and we'll help pay for your travel and accommodations.

Send us a proposal

Secure your spot

General admission tickets are on sale now for €99, and all proceeds will benefit the Software Freedom Conservancy. You can also add a ticket for our workshop day on March 7 until they sell out.

Get tickets

See what Git Merge is about in our 2017 recap video.

This month, we’re introducing a few new apps to help you write, manage, and deploy code. To see what's new and find more ways to work better, head to GitHub Marketplace.

Testing
TestQuality provides modern and powerful test plan management that's seamlessly integrated with GitHub. Test Management workflows are extended, so you can create, update, delete, and link defects and requirements in your repository without ever leaving your testing workflows. Best of all, TestQuality is completely free for use with public repositories on GitHub.

Project management
Issue.sh integrates natively with GitHub to provide agile project management with fine-grained permissions. The app includes issue boards, story points, finish time estimation, burndown charts, and more. Developers don't have to switch contexts, and project managers can get total visibility into the development process.

Publishing
Pageclip is a simple way to save form data from your website. Collect leads for your new product, set up a contact form, capture emails for a newsletter, or create white-labeled survey forms—all from your static website and without a server.

Security
BackHub creates daily recurring backups of all your public and private repositories, keeping an up-to-date backup with up to three months of snapshots. Backups include the repository and all metadata including the wikis, issues, and pull requests associated with it.

Deployment
Take care of your application instead of focusing on Capistrano and the asset pipeline. Cloud 66 for Rails provides everything you need to run production-ready Rails and Rack apps on any cloud and under your cloud account.

Continuous integration
Cloud 66 Skycap is a container-native CI/CD solution that allows you to build your image from source code in a reliable and repeatable way by taking code from your Git repository and running your Docker build workflow step-by-step. Skycap can also produce more than one image and comes with an intuitive interface and private Docker repository.

Ready to try out these new additions? See how they can help your team work better or discover even more tools in GitHub Marketplace.

Github Regional Sales Director Clay Nelson and MapBox’s Vice President of Business Development, Alex Barth explored how software development is evolving in the automotive space in a recent webcast.

With high consumer expectations, advances in software development, and new open source principles in highly-regulated industries, Barth says automotive companies must evolve or fall behind. Here are a few highlights from the webcast and a link to watch the full recording.

Watch the webcast

Growing consumer expectations

It's never been easier for consumers to interact with each other and the brands they care about, especially with social media platforms at their fingertips. That means automotive brands need to focus more than ever on acknowledging and meeting consumer expectations—even when they ask for the next wave of vehicles to be "smartphones on wheels". Coupled with the pressures of maintaining safety, quality, and security within code, these demands call for the adoption of open source principles and faster development.

New workflow complexities

In order to achieve the “rolling smartphone” effect, computing within vehicles is changing rapidly, from isolated micro-controllers to more integrated systems—and teams can no longer work in isolation. They're racing to deliver consumer-requested features that have more complexity and dependencies, which is especially challenging in a highly-regulated industry.

Accelerated collaborative development

With more modern workflows, such as the GitHub Flow, organizations can develop collaborative processes that allow for more visibility. This enables developers to communicate through code in a more straightforward (but still secure) way, rather than getting stuck in the same developmental bottleneck that has choked the industry for years.

To learn more about how GitHub works within the automotive industry, watch the webcast.

Watch more of our webcasts

2017 has been the year of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The advancements here will continue for years to come—but what can we expect in 2018? Data is on the rise, placing an even greater emphasis on security, cloud, and open source. Jason Warner, SVP of Technology, shares his predictions on the major technology trends for 2018.

Data will rule all

Over the last several years, Cloud 1.0 has been about computing in big clouds, while Cloud 2.0 is all about data. This includes data movement and the tools and services that support it, like analytics and machine learning systems. Today all companies are data companies, whether they know it or not. In 2018, so long as teams know how to use it, data will become their greatest asset.

The workflow war will heat up—and so will mergers and acquisitions (M&A)

The pressure is on for businesses to capture developers’ attention and expand the cloud ecosystem. Mergers and acquisitions will heat up as big tech companies snatch up smaller ones focusing on the developer experience, solving infrastructure problems, and building better workflow tools. At GitHub, we'll have a crucial role in integrating development platforms between these companies.

Open source will keep climbing the stack

A decade ago, Linux was a big deal. Now it’s standard. Back in the day, companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were forced to build their own, proprietary tools because no other software existed to meet their needs. Many of these frameworks have since been open sourced—and other open source technologies, like Kubernetes, are becoming integral to developers' workflows. This shift is changing what companies are investing in, making open source software traditional software's biggest competitor.

Infrastructure will have its Ruby on Rails moment

New tools will help developers get their ideas to production faster and save them time turning knobs under the hood. With applications taking some of the infrastructure burden off developers, they'll be free to focus on the stuff they care about most—building, growing, and evolving their projects and products.

Security will move into the spotlight, permanently

Security needs to be built into code development, not added in production. Many of the world’s critical systems still aren’t hardened enough—and their surface area is only getting bigger. The steady stream of malware attacks we saw this year will only become more frequent. As a result, we’ll start to see significantly more financial and development resources allocated to security. We’ll also see the rise of more intelligent systems, eventually culminating in a series of automatically secured layers.

Our free and open internet will be stress tested

The fragility of net neutrality and the rise of country-specific data localization laws will undoubtedly test the resilience not only of the internet—but also the fabric of global society and how businesses work together worldwide. 2018 will decide the future of net neutrality, and we'll feel the impact no matter the outcome. In the meantime, join us in the fight for net neutrality in the U.S. before the FCC votes on December 14.

Today’s software is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. There’s a good chance your project relies on someone else's, and if your project is public that others might rely on it, too. GitHub's new dependency graph gives you insight into the projects your code depends on and the projects that depend on your code.

Join GitHub Product Manager Miju Han and Trainer Matt Desmond to learn how to use your dependency graph to assess the security of your projects—and how to take action using suggested fixes. We’ll also discuss the future of security and the GitHub platform, including security alerts and additional language support. We'll also cover our approach to code security.

The webcast will take place December 19th at 12:30 pm PT. We hope to see you there!

Sign up

Home to over 80 million specimens from across the globe, the Natural History Museum is on a constant mission to make its collections more accessible by taking them from physical drawers to digital catalogs. To support their online collections, the Museum has developed specialized resources, like Inselect—a cross-platform, open source desktop application that automates how scientists digitize specimens. Using Inselect, researchers can crop images from whole-drawer scans, as well as similar images generated by digitizing museum collections.

Speeding up a creepy-crawly process

The museum initially developed Inselect for a simple purpose: to identify individual specimens from a drawer of samples in order to digitally categorize each. This isn’t a quick task—the Natural History Museum houses an estimated 33 million insect specimens in 130,000 drawers. Processed manually, it takes about an hour to categorize a drawer of specimens. Inselect, on the other hand, can do the same job in five to 10 minutes, depending on the complexity of the drawer.

Open source, open access

Despite its name, Inselect isn't just for insect specimens. Researchers and archivists can use the application for all sorts of projects that require cataloguing and categorizing for digital collections. In addition to working across a range of digital collections, Inselect operates on Windows and macOS under an open source license, allowing scientists and research institutes anywhere instant access rare specimens and providing a significant boost to the Natural History Museum’s digitization plans.

The Natural History Museum is by no means short of material to digitize. Researchers have adapted Inselect to look at slide digitization and have used to catalogue around 100,000 microscopic slides. The Digital Collections Programme at the museum is looking into digitizing more than just insects; they plan to make much larger artifacts such as fossils and skeletons available online, too. The scale of these artifacts, however, presents an entirely different challenge—but one that future open source software may well be able to solve.

By open sourcing Inselect, the Museum has provided a tool for other organizations to use, too. They've endorsed the Science International Open Data Accord and operate an open-by-default policy on their scientific collections. One result is the University of Sheffield’s project ‘Mark my bird’—a research project on the diversity of bird bills based on birds from their collection.

See Inselect in action

Two years ago, we breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the Open Internet Order—regulations allowing people to freely access and interact with information online, and protecting them from potential discriminatory practices by internet service providers.

In 2016, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, also known as the D.C. Circuit, gave us additional comfort when it upheld the regulations despite a challenge from the telecommunications industry.

Unfortunately, things change. Now an effort to repeal the order is underway, and we’re asking our community to once again help us protect net neutrality and rally behind a free and open internet.

Join us in the fight for net neutrality

The latest challenge

Earlier this year, FCC chairperson Ajit Pai expressed his intentions to get rid of the 2015 order. We wrote about this in July and joined more than one thousand companies urging the commissioner to reconsider. Despite widespread outcry from individuals and organizations alike, last week Pai made good on his intentions and released his proposal.

In response, Pai’s colleague Commissioner Mignon Clyburn released a fact sheet explaining the proposal while Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel penned an op-ed urging the public to “make a ruckus” and essentially save the FCC from itself.

Net neutrality is an issue that transcends party lines. A recent Morning Consult and Politico Poll indicated that Republican and Democratic support for net neutrality rules is essentially the same, differing only by a couple of percentage points.

Why it matters

Net neutrality gives developers the freedom to build and ship software without being potentially blocked, throttled, or tolled by internet service providers. The result has been vast opportunity for developers. It's crucial that public policy support expands the opportunity to participate in the software revolution. Undermining net neutrality at a time of concern about consolidation and inequality is precisely the wrong move—directly harmful to developers’ ability to launch new products and eroding trust that the internet is a force for innovation and opportunity.

What you can do

On December 14, the FCC will vote on Pai’s proposal—and it’s expected to pass. Supporters of net neutrality are already gearing up for another court battle. In the meantime, the U.S. Congress could attempt a legislative fix.

As this discussion evolves and net neutrality is continuously challenged, it’s important that your congressperson knows where you stand. Let them know that you’re energized and that you continue to stand in solidarity with the majority of people who support robust, net neutrality protection.

Call your U.S. congressperson today and urge them to oppose efforts to roll back net neutrality.