Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account • Hacker News Board

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#91

Post by aswanson » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:28 AM UTC

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.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#92

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:32 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #68

pjc50 wrote: 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…

Well, it was a joke based on a cliche from a Batman film. In terms of wise sayings, it's on the level of fortune cookies.

But the underlying point is similar to "you are the product". People chose Sourceforge because it offered free hosting. It was for a long time the "default" choice, back in the early 2000s. They had banner ads, usually from other Linux companies, and that seemed to pay for it. It was easier to use than FTP sites.

The question always remains: who is going to pay for it? If a company is sinking, then they have only two options, to close it down or to engage in ever-shadier chasing of monetisation options. Can you imagine the outrage if they'd put up a paywall? It's basically the same politics as has made "free to play (with gouging IAPs)" the default mode of paying for mobile apps.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#93

Post by sdoering » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:32 AM UTC

smegel wrote: post #42

Sourceforge is now on my personal blocklist for Google search results. Along with expertsexchange which I added years ago, and Quora which may surprise some.

Couldn't find how to do it in Google, did it in my hosts file...

For this device sourceforge now lives on 0.0.0.0. May it wither there forever.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#94

Post by gnoway » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:33 AM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #91

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?

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#95

Post by abstractbeliefs » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:39 AM UTC

moe wrote: post #78

For me the real question would be, why was/is anyone still using sourceforge? Inertia? I hope everybody still hosting there will take this reminder to finally move their stuff to a different host.

For many there are many projects that were hosted here before dying, and because of that, SF is both the official place to download and also SF sees it as fair game to take over and wrap with malware.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#96

Post by vermooten » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:40 AM UTC

luso_brazilian wrote: post #25

Just submitted the story to Slashdot [1]. Sharing the same owner as Sourceforge let's see if it gets "buried" [2] (or "late released due to an editor vacation" [3] as it was their explanation) or if they publish it in a timely manner and within the spirit of the submission. [1] http://slashdot.org/submission/4487045/sourceforge-hijacks-t... [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/381q6r/slashdot_buryi... [3] http:…

This is all such a shame. GitHub is to Sourceforge what HN is to Slashdot.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#97

Post by castell » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:40 AM UTC

yc1010 wrote: post #88

scrollaway wrote: post #84

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…

That's it, we need a open source community website that manages and links to the mirrors (HEANET, etc.).

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#98

Post by castell » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:41 AM UTC

mapt wrote: post #79

ghshephard wrote: post #14

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…

We need a open source community website that manages and links to the download-mirrors (HEANET, etc.). There is no need to backup the downloads, just back up the source code and friendly take over the control over the mirrors.

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#99

Post by dm2 » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:46 AM UTC

SourceForge was sold in 2012 to a conglomerate company named "DHI GROUP INC" or "Dice Holdings Inc" that owns the following companies:

  Dice
  Open Web
  The IT Job Board
  ClearanceJobs
  eFinancialCareers
  Rigzone
  HEALTHeCAREERS
  BioSpace
  Hcareers
  SourceForge
  Slashdot
  WorkDigital

Re: Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

#100

Post by Grue3 » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:50 AM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #19

nononononono wrote: post #13

So what decent release tarball storage services are there today if github's autogenerated release tarballs don't do it for you?

Given that a VPS like Digital Ocean will give you 1 Terabyte/month for $5/month, isn't it straightforward to hose your own tarball now? I see the nmap tarball is 20 Megabytes = 50,000 downloads. The cost of hosting should be easily covered by your user base.

50000 downloads is ridiculously low for any popular software package. Besides, VPS are not that fast at serving static files as you think. My VPS-hosted site became like 10x as fast when I made it pull 100kb-ish javascript files from a CDN instead of off VPS harddrive.