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Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

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Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#151
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People remember Sourceforge fondly because the service they offered, for the time, was good. 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…

>Everything internet sucked around 2000. Search engines where either semi-curated listing or covered a fraction of what was a much smaller internet. I disagree, and in fact preferred the internet of 2000 to the internet of 2015. Google search worked fine in 2000: although SEO existed in 2000, it was much less refined and extensive than in 2015. The main problem in search results today is that profit-motivated content…

You probably mean that you like the good design from 2000 (and well I share your opinion on that). But there was also the bad ones and there was a lot of them.

The majority of banking sites required you to use ActiveX, very frequently the shopping websites would use weirdo content plugins or have their content in PDF.

Those were the times of multi-frame abuse, webpage with sound and no control, site trying to be clever and disabling right-click. Pop-ups everywhere, site hijacking your browser window and resizing, moving it around. Stupid cursor that make your computer grind to a halt. Site designed for 640x480 and nothing else.

Remember the "blog"-like personal website on geocities and the like ? Remember the portals ?

What I remember most from the time is how much superior I thought the newsgroups were to find anything.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#152
post #137

This is the sort of behavior you get from a company that's lost, and is now trying to extract every penny they can from whatever shenanigans they can get away with. If they have no future brand value to be concerned about, then, from a game-theoretic approach, it's actually a pretty rational profit seeking move. (As long as they don't incur any downstream liabilities from outright illegal activity for which they migh…

>Of course, the game-theoretic response from the entire internet community is to make sure they never, ever, for any reasons whatsoever, ever click on a link that starts with "sourceforge.net" That's a nice idealistic response, but what about when you can't find a file anywhere else?

Depends on how much you need the file

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#153
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as one of those accounts is trojaning (or even just suspected of possibly having been trojaning once) it instantly poisons all the mirrors. Even if they are perfect netizens 99% of the time, that 1% makes all their other efforts useless.

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.

suspicion of possibly maybe having put a trojan in someone else's files

Isn't it a hard fact at this point?

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#154

I went to GIMP to get the latest version for Windows (Mine was 2+ years old) Strange, it seems newer but the Windows version was the same as mine. Google what up, randomly saw the Sourceforge controversy for GIMP in the news. Went to straight to SourceForge and got my update. Because they could be bothered. If you want Sourceforge to be evil, get your shit together GIMP. (Windows users are people too, plus appreciate…

If I go to GIMP.org and click Downloads, I see this:

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

> GIMP for Windows

> Via HTTP (.exe)

> Download GIMP 2.8.14

If I go to SourceForge.org (clicking first SF link on Google for "GIMP download"), I see this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/

> Download

> gimp-2.8.6-setup.exe

> Browse All Files

SourceForge has 2.8.6, GIMP.org has 2.8.14.

SourceForge has an older version. Where the hell did you go to?

(In fairness, SourceForge also has 2.8.14, but you have to go look at the file list rather than clicking the big green button. OTOH, GIMP.org's big button goes straight to the latest version.)

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#155
post #79

This is the sort of behavior you get from a company that's lost, and is now trying to extract every penny they can from whatever shenanigans they can get away with. If they have no future brand value to be concerned about, then, from a game-theoretic approach, it's actually a pretty rational profit seeking move. (As long as they don't incur any downstream liabilities from outright illegal activity for which they migh…

Has Archiveteam, Internet Archive or anyone else taken a shot at mirroring Sourceforge, including binaries? Since its founding there have been a hell of a lot of small projects hosted there whose sites have gone down since. 430,000 projects have been hosted on SourceForge at some point. At least a few tens of thousands of them represent the only remaining copy of a program needed to read a certain sort of data. Maint…

Archiving SourceForge is indeed important. Just recently I needed it to hook up a printer: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-print/files/usbtb%20-%2...

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#156
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either go bankrupt as a hero or live long enough to become the monetisation villain.

Sounds like a wise saying that I've read on every submission about Sourceforge, problem is that I think it is in general bullshit. If we'll look down in history, I think there are very few villains that have acted as heroes when starting out. The signs that such companies are assholes are in general there, from the start. As an example, I don't remember a time in which Sourceforge was the hero, as much as I try. Sinc…

How long have you been using SourceForge?

I remember a time when it was a fantastic resource, that it was one of the primary places to get FOSS - my earliest bookmarked link is for AFPL Ghostscript from 2004. IIRC I started using it around 1999 when I first installed Linux. There was Freshmeat too but that IME had far fewer of the major projects. Searching SourceForge was the best way to find projects for a particular need at the time.

The last FOSS project I downloaded there that isn't available elsewhere was last month.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#157
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whats worse is that they never had to spend a penny on hosting opensource files, the likes of HEANET in Ireland paid out of their pocket (well me and other Irish taxpayers did in end) to host terabytes of files and use gigabits on downloads at a time when bandwidth was expensive (10 years back bandwidth was a lot more and HEAnets downloads were always fast and I know the guys used a lot of hardware back then for the…

ftp.heanet.ie was a 32GB Itanium, one of the first Itanium servers I know of.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#158
post #23

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.

We saw it, but why does it matter? They also claimed to never add adware without consent before. Even considering to bundle up malware with FOSS projects is offensive to me. They lost my trust and a simple blog post won't win it back. The policy of taking over "abandoned" projects is super shady as well. That's what this mailing list post is about, isn't it?

Not "we" as the author of the post doesn't know about this announcement from sourceforge, as they say:

we haven't caught them trojaning Nmap the way they did with GIMP

So stop trying to speak for 100s of thousands of people at once.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#160

Sourceforge is looking more like a goner every day. It's time for github to step up and start offering projects download hosting and the whole slew of other things that sourceforge gives a project.

Github does have download hosting, though. Their "releases" feature has worked fine for my projects, at least:

https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

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