121–130 of 201 posts
If you didn't know sourceforge have back-pedalled 2 days ago and said they'll stop bundling the crapware in the mirrored projects: http://sourceforge.net/blog/third-party-offers-will-be-prese... The author, and a lot of the commentators here, don't seem to have seen that announcement.
I'm not saying I condone Sourceforge's actions, and this does deserve to be known widely, but what one person would consider privacy-invading malware could be another person's "helpful offers assistant" (or whatever)...
Why would they care about something that had 150 downloads since 2014? Seems like it may just have expired due to inactivity on the account.
Yeah, sad that I at one point thougthey were trustworthy. Hell, at one point I thought CNET was safe...until I downloaded and installed a "BestMp4ToMp3 converter" from there that infected the corporate network. Scumbag city, those sites. That's a major reason I support FOSS like VLC financially.
"BestMp4ToMp3 converter" didn't give it away?
Sourceforge needs to call it a day. Its day of relevancy is over, once upon a time it filled a need but we have Github, Bitbucket and much better choices now. What we are seeing is a site that is lost and will never be able to earn back the respect that it once had.
The world is calling it a day on Sourceforge - they are just hanging around to milk what they can out of past glories.
Of course they can't just turn off anyway: there would be outcry from people because their currently idle project that hasn't moved to being hosted elsewhere suddenly became unavailable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa what. Are you suggesting that suspicion of possibly maybe having put a trojan in someone else's files somewhere is grounds to make all one's efforts useless and poisons everything else you do? Geeze, I guess we should stop using Google. They've been accused and suspected of much worse by a lot of people. I hope that's not what you meant.
Are you suggesting that suspicion of possibly maybe having put a trojan in someone else's files somewhere is grounds to make all one's efforts useless and poisons everything else you do? Short answer: Yes. Downloading and running arbitrary binaries from the web inherently a quite dangerous thing do to, and I only feel comfortable taking such a risk with sites I trust. I no longer trust Sourceforge and there is very l…
Well, I don't agree¹ with your method of evaluating trustworthiness (which seems to me rather too quantized and "chastity"-minded), but at least you know exactly what you're doing and who you're trusting.
[1] Read as "I believe it's sub-optimal for a given cost-benefit formula, after some assumptions about certain variables and certain opportunity costs, and other methods would likely be more useful in context."
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You either go bankrupt as a hero or live long enough to become the monetisation villain.
This is a bit controversial because people like to remember Sourceforge fondly for some reason, but it was never good. It was merely unchallenged. Google Code was never good either, but people gladly moved from SF to Google Code. And when something actually good came along (Github), Sourceforge simply vanished. Sourceforge was never a hero. It was a horrible website, with horrible UX. It always had pretty terrible ad…
Everything internet sucked around 2000. Search engines where either semi-curated listing or covered a fraction of what was a much smaller internet. Free hosting was a joke, affordable paid hosting was not much better. Your bandwidth at home was not good and anyway your computer was not the powerhouse it is today - you needed to upgrade just to run the next version of Excel, not to play the next AAA game. A lot of websites had terrible UX.
So Sourceforge was not great, but it offered a great package of functionality that basically solved in one shot all the problem of managing a OSS project and gave one roof where to search for new tools and libraries.
What happened is that they stagnated and their utility eroded over the time starting by Google removing any reason to have everything in a central place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Github are indeed the heroes of the day and have an enterprise revenue model. So far, so good. But Sourceforge is sixteen years old. Will Github still be the good guys in 2030? It's impossible to know.
SourceForge used to have an enterprise revenue model, too. They bet the company (or at least the name) on it - VA Research -> VA Linux -> VA Software -> SourceForge -> GeekNet -> {Dice and HotTopic^WGameStop}. If Github ever pivots to selling t-shirts, run.
What I don't understand about any of this is why anyone wouldn't just either move their project to Github or self host. Why would you even still have your project hosted on SourceForge? I understand the author's grief and anger. I feel bad for them really as this will hurt the NMap brand, but come on, avoid the whole situation and just remove the project from SourceForge completely.
Personally, I like their download stats:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/apng/files/libpng/stats/tim...
But generally, why would I move if I never had problems with the service?
In spite of account hijacking, GIMP was still downloaded by almost 15k people this week. Six days ago they took over Audacity project as well, which was downloaded by more than 150k this week[0]. [0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/
What will happen if I run Audacity installer from sourceforge? I have done that an hour ago. Should I be concerned?
1. Go through installed programs and uninstall any that you don't want/ didn't know about. Google any you have questions about. (Clicking on date in upper right will sort from newest to oldest.)
2. Get rid of Audacity. We can only assume that this binary is infected as well as the installer.
3. Run something like malware bytes. Do be careful to get the right installer, as the website has many misleading links. Run this.
4. Install in browser: ad block edge for Firefox, or ad block plus for chrome or safari. Quit using IE if you use that.
That should take care of 99% of all problems on your windows machine. I have no clue if you should or should not be worried regarding bad binaries from scamforge. I haven't analyses the binaries.