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The Internet Archive has launched a free, browser-based Commodore 64 Emulator with over 10,500 programs that are "working and tested for at least booting properly." Interestingly, the emulator comes just before the launch of Commodore's own C64 Mini. "It's based off the VICE emulator version 3.2, which is a triumph of engineering," adds HardOCP.

"Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend," writes Bill Gates, challenging the widespread use of forecasts and policies based on a "supply and demand" economic model. An anonymous reader quotes the Gates Notes blog: Software doesn't work like this. Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce. Unlike the goods that powered our economy in the past, software is an intangible asset. And software isn't the only example: data, insurance, e-books, even movies work in similar ways.

The portion of the world's economy that doesn't fit the old model just keeps getting larger. That has major implications for everything from tax law to economic policy to which cities thrive and which cities fall behind, but in general, the rules that govern the economy haven't kept up. This is one of the biggest trends in the global economy that isn't getting enough attention. If you want to understand why this matters, the brilliant new book Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake is about as good an explanation as I've seen.... They don't act like there's something evil about the trend or prescribe hard policy solutions. Instead they take the time to convince you why this transition is important and offer broad ideas about what countries can do to keep up in a world where the "Ec 10" supply and demand chart is increasingly irrelevant.
"What the book reinforced for me is that lawmakers need to adjust their economic policymaking to reflect these new realities," Gates writes, adding "a lot has changed since the 1980s. It's time the way we think about the economy does, too."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows 8.1 dropped out of mainstream support earlier this year, entering the five-year extended support period in which it receives only security fixes. However, Microsoft is still accepting new software application submissions to the Windows 8 Store. Submissions for new Windows Phone 8 apps are also currently accepted. Today, Microsoft announced that this is soon coming to an end. After October 31, new applications will no longer be accepted for distribution through the store. Updates to existing applications will continue to be supported. However, there's now an end date for these, too: from July 1, 2023, Microsoft will cease to distribute any updates for Windows 8.1 Store applications. The deadline for Windows Phone 8 is sooner: updates for those apps will end on July 1, 2019.

Bloomberg reports:
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Terms of the agreement weren't known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.

GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, use GitHub to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It's also a social network of sorts for developers. While GitHub's losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016 -- it had revenue of $98 million in nine months of that year.
On Friday, it was reported that Microsoft was in talks with GitHub about an acquisition. Now it seems like it's actually happening.

Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in. Here is a tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge.
Update #2: Already, we are seeing plenty of backlash over this news. One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.
Update #3: It's official. Microsoft has acquired GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B.

SourceForge on Tuesday introduced an overhaul of its website to give it a new look and add new features. Among the most notable additions, the popular repository, which hosts over 430,000 projects and 3.7 million registered developers, said it was creating a GitHub Importer tool which would enable developers to import their GitHub project to SourceForge and also sync their GitHub project file releases on SourceForce so they "can take advantage of the strengths of both platforms." In a blog post, the team wrote:We believe the open source community is always better served when there are multiple options for open source projects to live, and these options are not mutually exclusive. More improvements and new features are on track to be released throughout the year, the team wrote.

SourceForge on Tuesday introduced an overhaul of its website to give it a new look and add new features. Among the most notable additions, the popular repository, which hosts over 430,000 projects and 3.7 million registered developers, said it was creating a GitHub Importer tool which would enable developers to import their GitHub project to SourceForge and also sync their GitHub project file releases on SourceForce so they "can take advantage of the strengths of both platforms." In a blog post, the team wrote:We believe the open source community is always better served when there are multiple options for open source projects to live, and these options are not mutually exclusive. More improvements and new features are on track to be released throughout the year, the team wrote.

WheezyJoe writes: Classic Shell is a free Windows application that for years has replaced Microsoft's Start Screen or Start Menu with a highly configurable, more familiar non-tile Start menu. Yesterday, the lead developer released what he said would be the last version of Classic Shell. Citing other interests and the frequency at which Microsoft releases updates to Windows 10, as well as lagging support for the Win32 programming model, the developer says that he won't work on the program anymore. The application's source code is available on SourceForge, so there is a chance others may come and fork the code to continue development. There are several alternatives available, some pay and some free (like Start10 and Start Is Back++), but Classic Shell has an exceptionally broad range of tweaks and customizability.

Microsoft corporate vice president Brian Harry announced in a blog post today that they are shutting down CodePlex, its service for hosting repositories of open source software. "As of this post, we've disabled the ability to create new CodePlex projects," Harry wrote. "In October, we'll set CodePlex to read-only, before shutting it down completely on December 15th, 2017." VentureBeat reports: While people will be able to download an archive of their data, Microsoft is teaming up with GitHub, which provides similar functionality for hosting code that people can collaborate on, to give users "a streamlined import experience" to migrate code and related content there. "Over the years, we've seen a lot of amazing options come and go but at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there," Harry wrote. Microsoft has been leaning in more and more to GitHub in the past few years. It moved the CNTK deep learning toolkit from CodePlex to GitHub last year. Today Microsoft's GitHub organization has more than 16,000 open source contributors, Harry wrote. And last year GitHub itself made a big deal about Microsoft's adoption of GitHub. At the same time, CodePlex has rotted. In the past month people have made commits to fewer than 350 projects, Harry wrote. GitHub is based on the Git open source version control software, which keeps track of changes by multiple people. People can move code to alternative systems like Atlassian's Bitbucket and Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services, Harry wrote. The startup GitLab also offers hosting for open and closed source projects.

Slashvertisement: Here is SourceForge's message to CodePlex devs.

SourceForge announced on Wednesday that it is introducing HTTPS for all project websites on its platform. Once a project has been moved to HTTPS, old domain will automatically redirect to their new counterparts, resulting in no loss of traffic or inconvenience. From a blog post on the site: With a single click, projects can opt-in to switch their web hosting from http://name.sourceforge.net to https://name.sourceforge.io. Project admins can find this option in the Admin page, under "HTTPS", naturally.There's also a guide to assist developers with the transition. SourceForge launched HTTPS support for SourceForge.net back in February, but this rolls out HTTPS support to individual project websites hosted on SourceForge. There's also a Site News section on the website now where you can read about all SourceForge changes and improvements over the past year since SourceForge was acquired by BIZX, such as eliminating the DevShare program and scanning all projects for malware.

SourceForge announced on Wednesday that it is introducing HTTPS for all project websites on its platform. Once a project has been moved to HTTPS, old domain will automatically redirect to their new counterparts, resulting in no loss of traffic or inconvenience. From a blog post on the site: With a single click, projects can opt-in to switch their web hosting from http://name.sourceforge.net to https://name.sourceforge.io. Project admins can find this option in the Admin page, under "HTTPS", naturally.There's also a guide to assist developers with the transition. SourceForge launched HTTPS support for SourceForge.net back in February, but this rolls out HTTPS support to individual project websites hosted on SourceForge. There's also a Site News section on the website now where you can read about all SourceForge changes and improvements over the past year since SourceForge was acquired by BIZX, such as eliminating the DevShare program and scanning all projects for malware.

SourceForge announced on Wednesday that it is introducing HTTPS for all project websites on its platform. Once a project has been moved to HTTPS, old domain will automatically redirect to their new counterparts, resulting in no loss of traffic or inconvenience. From a blog post on the site: With a single click, projects can opt-in to switch their web hosting from http://name.sourceforge.net to https://name.sourceforge.io. Project admins can find this option in the Admin page, under "HTTPS", naturally.There's also a guide to assist developers with the transition. SourceForge launched HTTPS support for SourceForge.net back in February, but this rolls out HTTPS support to individual project websites hosted on SourceForge. There's also a Site News section on the website now where you can read about all SourceForge changes and improvements over the past year since SourceForge was acquired by BIZX, such as eliminating the DevShare program and scanning all projects for malware.

SourceForge announced on Wednesday that it is introducing HTTPS for all project websites on its platform. Once a project has been moved to HTTPS, old domain will automatically redirect to their new counterparts, resulting in no loss of traffic or inconvenience. From a blog post on the site: With a single click, projects can opt-in to switch their web hosting from http://name.sourceforge.net to https://name.sourceforge.io. Project admins can find this option in the Admin page, under "HTTPS", naturally.There's also a guide to assist developers with the transition. SourceForge launched HTTPS support for SourceForge.net back in February, but this rolls out HTTPS support to individual project websites hosted on SourceForge. There's also a Site News section on the website now where you can read about all SourceForge changes and improvements over the past year since SourceForge was acquired by BIZX, such as eliminating the DevShare program and scanning all projects for malware.

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone appears to have a speed test of their own nowadays. Netflix launched fast.com more than a month ago; SourceForge released their new HTML5 speed test soon after. Google appears to want a piece of the action as they are trying out a way for people to check their internet speed by simply typing "check internet speed" into search. The tests are performed by Google's Measurement Lab tools, and were first spotted by Pete Meyers, who posted a screenshot of the feature and discovered a Google Support webpage detailing how it works. The feature has not been widely released yet, but it's possible we'll see it made more widely available soon.

An anonymous reader quotes this report from Engadget: Think it's bad when companies take their time fixing security vulnerabilities? Imagine what happens when they avoid fixing those holes in the name of a little cash. KeePass 2 developer Dominik Reichl has declined to patch a flaw in the password manager's update check as the 'indirect costs' of the upgrade (which would encrypt web traffic) are too high -- namely, it'd lose ad revenue...

To his credit, Reichl notes that he'd like to move to encryption as soon as he believes it's possible. You can also verify that you're getting a signed download, if you're worried. However, it's still contradictory to develop a security-centric app and decide that security should take a back seat.
An update on the site says the software's version information file is now digitally signed, adding that KeePass "neither downloads nor installs any new version automatically. Users have to do this manually... users should check whether the file is digitally signed... HTTPS cannot prevent a compromise of the download server; checking the digital signature does."

Christine Hall at FOSS Force reports: It appears as if the new owners at SourceForge are serious about fixing the mistakes made by the sites previous owners. FOSS Force has just learned that as of today, the software repository used by many free and open source projects is scanning all hosted projects for malware. Projects that don't make the grade will be noticeably flagged with a red warning badge located beside the project's download button. According to a notice posted on the SourceForge website this afternoon, the scans look for "adware, viruses, and any unwanted applications that may be intentionally or inadvertently included in the software package." Account holders with projects flagged as containing malware will be notified by SourceForge. In today's announcement, SourceForge said that a thousand or so of the sites most popular projects [representing 84% of all SourceForge traffic] have so far been scanned, with scans continuing to eventually include "every last project, even dating back years." As the site hosts somewhere around 500,000 projects, this first scanning is expected to take several weeks. The company also says that beginning immediately, all new projects will be scanned during the uploading process. This latest move is in keeping with promises made to the community when the new owners, SourceForge Media, took control of SourceForge and Slashdot on January 28, 2016.

prisoninmate writes: What's ubuntuBSD? Well, it's not that hard to figure out yourself, but just in case you're not sure, we can tell you that ubuntuBSD promises to bring the power of the FreeBSD kernel to Ubuntu Linux. The best part of using the FreeBSD kernel is that you'll end up using the famous Z File System, or ZFS. Xfce is also included along with the popular Firefox, LibreOffice, and Ubuntu Software Center apps. ubuntuBSD is inspired by the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project, it is hosted on SourceForge, and has been created by Jon Boden.

jeditobe was one of several readers to point out the newest major release of Windows NT-inspired ReactOS, which has just hit version 0.4, brings open source Windows compatibility a little bit closer. The new release includes out-of-the-box support for ext2, ext3, and ext4, as well as (remember, it is NT based) read-only support for NTFS. What else? Support was generally improved for third-party device drivers, making it substantially easier to install and use real hardware, as opposed to just virtual machines like VirtualBox. The internal WINE library was updated to improve support for Win32 programs. Support for Python 2.7 was added, making it possible to use python scripts in ReactOS. A substantial number of visual changes were added, with a vastly improved shell and file explorer, newer icons throughout ReactOS, improved support for fonts, and customizable visual themes. Even with these improvements, ReactOS 0.4 is still generally considered alpha-level software, though Alexander Rechitskiy, the innovation manager for ReactOS, notes that 0.4.1 may be almost beta-level software.

SourceForge has officially eliminated its DevShare program. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that. We are more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit. This is just the first step in a number of improvements we will outline in the coming weeks. SourceForge and Slashdot were acquired in late January by BIZX.

An anonymous reader writes: Big systems of hundreds of satellites are under development to provide wireless Internet globally, with Richard Branson's OneWeb and Thales' LeoSat aiming at consumers and business markets respectively. It's like reliving the late 1990s, when Bill Gates' Teledesic and Motorola's Celestri were trying to do the same thing before merging their efforts and then giving up. And now you can simulate OneWeb and LeoSat for yourself, and compare them to older systems, in the new release of the vintage SaVi satellite simulation package, which was created in the 1990s during the first time around. Bear in mind Karl Marx's dictum of history: the first time is tragedy, and the second time is farce. Do these new systems stand a chance?

VernonNemitz writes: There are a lot of ways for hackers to abuse a web site, but it seems to me that one of them is receiving less attention than it deserves. This is the simple uploading of a malware file, that has an innocent file-name extension. I'm looking for a simple file-type verification program that the site could automatically run, on each uploaded file, to test it to see if it is actually the type of file that its file-name extension claims it is. That way, if it ever gets double-clicked, we can be assured it won't hijack the system or worse. At the moment I'm only interested in testing .png files, but I'm sure plenty of web site operators would want to be able to test other file types. A quick Googling indicates the existence of a validator project under the OWASP umbrella, but is it the best choice, and what other choices are there?

itwbennett writes: Sandra Henry-Stocker became curious about how much more complex the jpg format had become since she first did a deep dive into it more than twenty years ago, so she dug into how much information is stored and where. "This information is quite extensive — depending on the digital camera you're using," says Henry-Stocker, "containing detailed information about the photo such as the make and model of the digital camera that was used, whether a flash was used, the focal length, light value, and the shutter speed that was used when it was taken. And, if your phone/camera has geotagging turned on, it will also include the altitude, longitude and latitude of the place where the photo was taken." Henry-Stocker used exiftool to extract and label the data so you can see what is collected, and how you can protect your privacy as well as your intellectual property.

An anonymous reader writes: A relative of mine has been hinting that he'd like me to take over his model railroad collection in the event of his death (or even before that, to make this a bit less morbid-sounding). I'm intrigued by the idea, because I've been interested in model railroads for years, but too commitment shy and too transient to actually start a collection. That's changed enough that I'd like to start planning a train system, and am looking for advice from people who have been at it for a while. A couple of parameters: 1) I'm only interested for now in HO-scale stuff, so I am not all that interested in the relative merits of the other kinds, cool as they might be. 2) Related, I am somewhat less interested in the rolling stock than I am in the construction and control of the track and surrounding landscape. Interested in learning from experienced model railroad enthusiasts what lessons you've learned over the years that would be useful for a newbie, especially if you've made some cool automation for your system, or have built extensive support structures. This includes negative lessons, too, if you've overloaded circuits or floorboards. I'd *like* to integrate some interesting sensors and control systems, and I see some interesting open source software for this. So: What advice would you give to a late-start railroader? For reference: this set-up may end up living in an unfinished suburban basement.

Wired UK reports that the pre-installed Solitaire on Windows 10 capitalizes on the long-cultivated addiction that some users have to the game with an interesting bargain: rather than being an ordinary included application like it used to be, what may be the world's most pervasive on-screen office time-sink of a game now comes with ads, unless a user wants to pay (by the month, or by the year) to remove those ads. Notes the linked piece: "To be entirely fair, this is the same as on the Windows 8 version, which wasn't installed by default but could be downloaded from the Windows Store."

At $1.49/month or $10/year, this might be enough to drive some people who otherwise would not to check out some of the free, open-source games out there; PySolitaire is one of many in this incomplete list.

Wired UK reports that the pre-installed Solitaire on Windows 10 capitalizes on the long-cultivated addiction that some users have to the game with an interesting bargain: rather than being an ordinary included application like it used to be, what may be the world's most pervasive on-screen office time-sink of a game now comes with ads, unless a user wants to pay (by the month, or by the year) to remove those ads. Notes the linked piece: "To be entirely fair, this is the same as on the Windows 8 version, which wasn't installed by default but could be downloaded from the Windows Store."

At $1.49/month or $10/year, this might be enough to drive some people who otherwise would not to check out some of the free, open-source games out there; PySolitaire is one of many in this incomplete list.

An anonymous reader writes: DHI Group Inc. (formerly known as Dice Holdings Inc.) announced plans to sell Slashdot Media (slashdot.org & sourceforge.net) in their Q2 financial report. This is being reported by multiple sources. Editor's note: Yep, looks like we're being sold again. We'll keep you folks updated, but for now I don't have any more information than is contained in the press release. Business as usual until we find a buyer (and hopefully after). The company prepared a statement for our blog as well — feel free to discuss the news here, there, or in both places.

If you were browsing the site on Thursday, you may have noticed that we went static for a big chunk of the day. A few of you asked what the deal was, so here's quick follow-up. The short version is that a storage fault led to significant filesystem corruption, and we had to restore a massive amount of data from backups. There's a post at the SourceForge blog going into a bit more detail, and describing the steps our Siteops team took (and is still taking) to restore service. (Slashdot and SourceForge share a corporate overlord, as well as a fair bit of infrastructure.)

vivaoporto writes: In a reversal motivated by community concerns (like the high profile outcry over the distribution of an ads-enabled installer for GIMP and the accusation by Fyodor of the hijacking of the nmap SourceForge project), SourceForge has discontinued third-party bundling of mirrored content.

Along with that, as of June 18th, SourceForge started "removing SourceForge-maintained mirrored projects" and engaging their "newly-formed Community Panel to discuss site features and program policies including a redesigned mirror program." Of the 295 mirrored projects, they removed all that were "not co-maintained with one or more of the original developers, except where the upstream site has been discontinued." For those wanting to reach SourceForge for some constructive feedback, they point to the recently-established Community Voice forum. Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.

vivaoporto writes: In a reversal motivated by community concerns (like the high profile outcry over the distribution of an ads-enabled installer for GIMP and the accusation by Fyodor of the hijacking of the nmap SourceForge project), SourceForge has discontinued third-party bundling of mirrored content.

Along with that, as of June 18th, SourceForge started "removing SourceForge-maintained mirrored projects" and engaging their "newly-formed Community Panel to discuss site features and program policies including a redesigned mirror program." Of the 295 mirrored projects, they removed all that were "not co-maintained with one or more of the original developers, except where the upstream site has been discontinued." For those wanting to reach SourceForge for some constructive feedback, they point to the recently-established Community Voice forum. Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.

An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago, the maintainer of nmap (an open source network mapping tool) complained that SourceForge had taken over the nmap project page. SourceForge has now responded with a technical analysis of the nmap project history. They said, "We've confirmed conclusively that no changes were made to the project or data, and that all past download delivery by nmap on SourceForge was through our web hosting service where content is project-administered."

They detail the history of services used by the nmap project, and use screenshots from the Internet Archive to show how long the project was empty. SourceForge said, "The last update date in 2013 relates to the migration of the nmap project (along with all other projects on the site) from SourceForge's sfx code base to the new Apache Allura-based code base. This migration was an automated operation conducted for all projects, and this platform change did not augment data in the Project Web service or File Release System. We therefore conclude that no content has been removed from the nmap project page." They also confirmed that nmap downloads were never bundled with ads: "Infosec professionals do not generally wish to install secondary offers." Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.

vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that he does not control the SourceForge nmap project.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which is controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in a pattern mirroring the much discussed takeover of the GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week on Slashdot.

On Monday, Sourceforge promised to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects," and to their credit Fyodor states, "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files," but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html." To browse the projects and mirrors currently controlled by SourceForge, you can look at these account pages: sf-editor1, sf-editor2, and sf-editor3.

vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that he does not control the SourceForge nmap project.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which is controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in a pattern mirroring the much discussed takeover of the GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week on Slashdot.

On Monday, Sourceforge promised to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects," and to their credit Fyodor states, "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files," but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html." To browse the projects and mirrors currently controlled by SourceForge, you can look at these account pages: sf-editor1, sf-editor2, and sf-editor3.

vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that he does not control the SourceForge nmap project.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which is controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in a pattern mirroring the much discussed takeover of the GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week on Slashdot.

On Monday, Sourceforge promised to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects," and to their credit Fyodor states, "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files," but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html." To browse the projects and mirrors currently controlled by SourceForge, you can look at these account pages: sf-editor1, sf-editor2, and sf-editor3.

vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that he does not control the SourceForge nmap project.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which is controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in a pattern mirroring the much discussed takeover of the GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week on Slashdot.

On Monday, Sourceforge promised to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects," and to their credit Fyodor states, "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files," but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html." To browse the projects and mirrors currently controlled by SourceForge, you can look at these account pages: sf-editor1, sf-editor2, and sf-editor3.

vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that he does not control the SourceForge nmap project.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which is controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in a pattern mirroring the much discussed takeover of the GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week on Slashdot.

On Monday, Sourceforge promised to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects," and to their credit Fyodor states, "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files," but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html." To browse the projects and mirrors currently controlled by SourceForge, you can look at these account pages: sf-editor1, sf-editor2, and sf-editor3.

vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that he does not control the SourceForge nmap project.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which is controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in a pattern mirroring the much discussed takeover of the GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week on Slashdot.

On Monday, Sourceforge promised to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects," and to their credit Fyodor states, "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files," but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html." To browse the projects and mirrors currently controlled by SourceForge, you can look at these account pages: sf-editor1, sf-editor2, and sf-editor3.

New submitter tresf writes: In response to a Google+ post from the Gimp project claiming that "[Sourceforge] is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP," Sourceforge had this response: "In cases where a project is no longer actively being maintained, SourceForge has in some cases established a mirror of releases that are hosted elsewhere. This was done for GIMP-Win.

Submitter's note: Gimp is actively being maintained and the definition of "mirror" is quite misleading here as a modified binary is no longer a verbatim copy. Download statistics for Gimp on Windows show SourceForge as offering over 1,000 downloads per day of the Gimp software.

In an official response to this incident, the official Gimp project team reminds users to use official download methods. Slashdotters may remember the last time news like this surfaced (2013) when the Gimp team decided to move downloads from SourceForge to their own FTP service. "Therefore, we remind you again that GIMP only provides builds for Windows via its official Downloads page." Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent. Editor's note: I just got back from a busy weekend to see that a bunch of people are freaking out that we're "burying" this story, so here it is. Go hog wild. Sorry it took so long. (And for future reference, user submissions are easily found in the firehose, listed in the order they appear, newest first.)

Update: 06/01 22:37 GMT by T : The SourceForge blog has a welcome update; SourceForge, it says, has effective today "stopped presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects. ... At this time, we present third party offers only with a few projects where it is explicitly approved by the project developer, or if the project is already bundling third party offers."

New submitter tresf writes: In response to a Google+ post from the Gimp project claiming that "[Sourceforge] is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP," Sourceforge had this response: "In cases where a project is no longer actively being maintained, SourceForge has in some cases established a mirror of releases that are hosted elsewhere. This was done for GIMP-Win.

Submitter's note: Gimp is actively being maintained and the definition of "mirror" is quite misleading here as a modified binary is no longer a verbatim copy. Download statistics for Gimp on Windows show SourceForge as offering over 1,000 downloads per day of the Gimp software.

In an official response to this incident, the official Gimp project team reminds users to use official download methods. Slashdotters may remember the last time news like this surfaced (2013) when the Gimp team decided to move downloads from SourceForge to their own FTP service. "Therefore, we remind you again that GIMP only provides builds for Windows via its official Downloads page." Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent. Editor's note: I just got back from a busy weekend to see that a bunch of people are freaking out that we're "burying" this story, so here it is. Go hog wild. Sorry it took so long. (And for future reference, user submissions are easily found in the firehose, listed in the order they appear, newest first.)

Update: 06/01 22:37 GMT by T : The SourceForge blog has a welcome update; SourceForge, it says, has effective today "stopped presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects. ... At this time, we present third party offers only with a few projects where it is explicitly approved by the project developer, or if the project is already bundling third party offers."

Nerval's Lobster writes Procedural dungeon generation is a fun exercise for programmers. Despite the crude interface, such games continue to spark interest. A quarter century ago, David Bolton wrote a dungeon generator in procedural Pascal; now he's taken that old code and converted it to C#. It's amazing just how fast it runs on a five-year-old i7 950 PC with 16GB of RAM. If you want to follow along, you can find his code for the project on SourceForge. The first part of the program generates the rooms in a multilevel dungeon. Each level is based on a 150 x 150 grid and can have up to 40 rooms. Rather than just render boring old rectangular rooms, there are also circular rooms. "There are a couple of places where corridor placement could have been optimized better," Bolton wrote about his experiment. "However, the dungeon generation is still very fast, and could provide a good programming example for anyone exploring what C# can do." For C# beginners, this could represent a solid exercise.

MassDosage writes "At the the risk of exposing my age I remember building my first website using a rudimentary Unix text editor (Joe) and carefully handcrafting the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) while directly logged on to the web server it was being served from. Back then Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) weren't even a glint in the eyes of their creators. A lot has changed and there's now a world of fancy WYSIWYG web page editors to choose from as well as Content Management Systems that allow you to create websites without looking at the underlying code at all. While this is all very useful and allows less technical people to create websites I still feel that having at least some knowledge of how everything works under the hood is empowering — especially in situations where you want to go beyond the limits placed on you by a certain tool. This is where Build Your Own Website: A comic guide to HTML, CSS and Wordpress comes into the picture. Its aim is to enable people new to web development to learn the subject by teaching the fundamentals of HTML and CSS first and only then describing how to use a Content Management System (CMS) — in this case Wordpress. While Wordpress might not be everyone's kettle of fish it's a good choice as an example of a modern CMS that is easily accessible and very popular. The concepts presented are simple enough that it should be easy enough for a reader to apply them to a different CMS should they want to. Read below for The rest of MassDosage's review. Build Your Own Website: A Comic Guide to HTML, CSS, and WordPress author Nate Cooper and Kim Gee pages 264 publisher No Starch Press rating 7.5/10 reviewer MassDosage ISBN 1593275226 summary An illustrated introduction to the basics of creating a website To be clear, this book is intended for people who have little to no experience building websites and it is appropriately written in a non-formal, fun and non-threatening manner. Each chapter has the same format where a topic is initially covered at a high level in the form of a cartoon that is really easy to grasp. This is then followed by a more in-depth repetition of the same content using more "traditional" text and diagrams. Most chapters then end with a summary of the key points which can be used as a simple reference. This layout means that if you're a quick learner or are familiar with some of the concepts you can just read the comic section and then try implementing the material covered on your own. On the other hand if you want more information and depth you can read the text that follows.The material is presented in such a way that it should be easy for the reader to "learn by doing" as they copy or modify what the main character in the cartoon does (in this case building a website for her photography portfolio). All that's needed to get started is a browser, a text editor and some knowledge of how to organize files on a file system. This coverage of raw HTML and CSS may sound off-putting to non-technical people but it's presented in such a simple manner that pretty much anyone should be able to follow along. The benefit of this "back to the basics" approach is that one is not limited to using only a certain piece of software and instead the fundamentals can be applied to other tools later.

The book provides a good introduction to HTML and describes some useful tags that can be used to start creating a simple website. CSS are explained in a similar manner and the reader is shown how they can be used to easily change the look of a website. These two technologies are the bedrock on top of which pretty much all web development rests and thus understanding them is a prerequisite for anyone wanting to create their own websites. The book also does a good job of showing how a content management system like Wordpress builds on top of these foundations and how you can still get to the underlying HTML and CSS should you want to (as well as why this might be useful if you want to modify something that Wordpress does or doesn't do). On the Wordpress front the basics are covered — from creating pages and page hierarchies to how these can be categorized and grouped. Unfortunately when going into more detail on this topic things lose a bit of coherence. Wordpress is obviously a big beast which has entire books devoted to it and cramming in a summary of it means having to leave out a lot. It seems as if the author might have had to trim these sections down and this has resulted in the text feeling a bit rushed and confusing which is in contrast with the rest of the book where the topics are covered in a slower and more detailed manner. Any book that describes using a piece of software like Wordpress to the level of explaining how to point and click one's way through certain step risks becoming outdated as the software changes in future. For the most part this shouldn't be too much of an issue as Wordpress isn't covered in too much detail but it does mean that this book probably won't be a reference you still use in five year's time.

On the whole Build Your Own Website: A Comic Guide to HTML, CSS, and WordPress succeeds in its goal of presenting a gentle learning curve and guiding people through what is needed to create a website from scratch. It is just technical enough that readers should be able to understand the fundamentals of what they are doing while being non-intimidating and introducing concepts at a relaxed and fun pace via the comic format. By the end of this book readers should have a solid grasp of the basics of website creation and be able to set up a simple site themselves, either by coding this up in HTML and CSS directly or by using Wordpress. For anything more advanced one would need to move on to other books or self-teaching but this book is a great starting point if you're new to the subject.

You can purchase Build Your Own Website: A Comic Guide to HTML, CSS, and WordPress from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you'd like to see what books we have available from our review library please let us know.

descubes (35093) writes "Tao3D is a new open-source programming language designed for real-time 3D animations. With it, you can quickly create interactive, data-rich presentations, small applications, proofs of concept, user interface prototypes, and more. The interactivity of the language, combined with its simplicity and graphical aspects, make it ideal to teach programming.

Tao3D also demonstrates a lot of innovation in programming language design. It makes it very easy to create new control structures. Defining if-then-else is literally a couple of lines of code. The syntax to pass pass blocks of code to functions is completely transparent. And it is fully reactive, meaning that it automatically reacts as necessary to external events such as mouse movements or the passage of time.

The source code was just made available under the GNU General Public License v3 on SourceForge [as linked above], GitHub and Gitorious."

Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes Earlier this year, Apple executives unveiled Swift, which is meant to eventually replace Objective-C as the programming language of choice for Macs and iOS devices. Now that iOS 8's out, a lot of developers who build apps for Apple's platforms will likely give Swift a more intensive look. While Apple boasts that Swift makes programming easy, it'll take some time to learn how the language works. A new walkthrough by developer David Bolton shows how to build a very simple app in Swift, complete with project files (hosted on SourceForge) so you can follow along. A key takeaway: while some Swift features do make programming easier, there's definitely a learning curve here.

jones_supa (887896) writes It's been a while since a new ScummVM release, but version 1.7.0 is now here with many exciting features. New games supported are The Neverhood, Mortville Manor, Voyeur, Return to Ringworld and Chivalry is Not Dead. The Roland MT-32 emulator has been updated, there is an OpenGL backend, the GUI has seen improvements, AGOS engine is enhanced, tons of SCI bug fixes have been applied, and various other improvements can be found. This version also introduces support for the OUYA gaming console and brings improvements to some other more exotic platforms. Please read the release notes for an accurate description of the new version. SCUMM being the language/interpreter used by many classic adventure games.

Jim Hall (2985) writes "In a June 29, 1994 post in comp.os.msdos.apps on USENET, a physics student announced an effort to create a completely free version of DOS that everyone could use. That project turned into FreeDOS, 20 years ago! Originally intended as a free replacement for MS-DOS, FreeDOS has since advanced what DOS could do, adding new functionality and making DOS easier to use. And today in 2014, people continue to use FreeDOS to support embedded systems, to run business software, and to play classic DOS games!"

Engineers at Intel have been working to modify the open source JavaScript engines used by Chrome and Firefox to support SIMD vectorization -- which will bring JavaScript one step closer to supporting near-native applications. Jeff Cogswell takes a look at some of the sample code and see if he can figure out what they’re doing. One particularly interesting aspect about this code is that it was written in part by a guy who works at Google and is active in Google’s Dart language. Dart was created to be a replacement to JavaScript as a browser language, but there has been some resistance.

Engineers at Intel have been working to modify the open source JavaScript engines used by Chrome and Firefox to support SIMD vectorization -- which will bring JavaScript one step closer to supporting near-native applications. Jeff Cogswell takes a look at some of the sample code and see if he can figure out what they’re doing. One particularly interesting aspect about this code is that it was written in part by a guy who works at Google and is active in Google’s Dart language. Dart was created to be a replacement to JavaScript as a browser language, but there has been some resistance.

Several readers sent word that the website for TrueCrypt, the popular disk encryption system, says that development has ended, and Windows users should switch to BitLocker. A notice on the site reads, "WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues. ... You should migrate any data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported on your platform." It includes a link to a new version of TrueCrypt, 7.2, and provides instructions on how to migrate to BitLocker. Many users are skeptical of a site defacement, and there's been no corroborating post or communication from the maintainers. However, the binaries appear to be signed with the same GPG key that the TrueCrypt Foundation used for previous releases. A source code diff of the two versions has been posted, and the new release appears to simply remove much of what the software was designed to do. It also warns users away from relying on it for security. (The people doing an audit of TrueCrypt had promised a 'big announcement' soon, but that was coincidental.) Security experts are warning to avoid the new version until the situation can be verified.

We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that's in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. "Family," because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that's gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org's direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: "The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2,800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?" If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot's corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.

rjmarvin (3001897) writes "Two Princeton computer science students have created an open source platform for developing voice-controlled applications that are always on. Created by Shubhro Saha and Charlie Marsh, Jasper runs on the Raspberry Pi under Raspbian, using a collection of open source libraries to make up a development platform for building voice-controlled applications. Marsh and Saha demonstrate Jasper's capability to perform Internet searches, update social media, and control music players such as Spotify. You need a few easily obtainable bits of hardware (a USB microphone, wifi dongle or ethernet, and speakers). The whole thing is powered by CMU Sphinx (which /. covered the open sourcing of back in 2000). Jasper provides Python modules (under the MIT license) for recognizing phrases and taking action, or speaking when events occur. There doesn't seem to be anything tying it to the Raspberry Pi either, so you could likely run it on an HTPC for always-on voice control of your media center.

Former chairman of VA Software and venture capitalist, Larry Augustin, co-founded VA Research in 1993 and was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Sourceforge. VA bought Andover.net in 2000, acquiring a number of media sites, including Slashdot. He serves on the board of several companies and is currently the CEO of SugarCRM. Larry has agreed to take some time and answer your questions about the world of venture capital, open source software, and surviving the dotcom bubble. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post

enharmonix writes "I have a big decision to make. I am probably going to buy a laptop that I will primarily use for music. I would prefer an OEM distro so I don't need to install the OS myself (not that I mind), but I have no preference between open- and closed-source software as an end-user; I just care about the quality of the product. There are two applications that I absolutely must have: 1) a standard notation transcription program with quality auditioning (i.e., playback with quality sound fonts or something similar, better than your standard MIDI patches) that can also accept recorded audio in lieu of MIDI playback, and 2) a capable synthesizer (the more options, the better). If there's software out there that does both 1 and 2 in the same app, that's even better. I've played with some of Ubuntu's offerings for music a few years ago and some are very good, though not all of them are self-explanatory and the last time I checked, none of them really met my needs. I am not so worried about number 2 because I think I could pretty easily develop my own in .NET/Mono, which I think would be a fun project (which would be open source, of course). I am a Gnome fan so if I go with Linux, I will almost certainly go with standard Ubuntu over Kubuntu, but Gnome seems to rule out Rosegarden which was the best FOSS transcription software out there the last time I checked. The other solution I've thought of is to just shell out the $600 for Finale, which I'm more than willing to do, but I'm not so sure I want Windows 8 and I'm just not sure I can afford to go with a Mac on top of the $600 for Finale. I don't intend to put more than one OS on my laptop, either. Any slashdotters out there dabble in composing/recording, using MIDI, sound fonts, recorded audio, and/or synthesizers? What setup of hardware/OS/software works for you? Can FOSS music software compete with their pricier closed source competitors?" The KXStudio apps installed over Debian or Ubuntu tend to be pretty nice (better session handling that gladish provides at least).