Phoronix, the website published by Michael Larabel and his team, is having its twelfth birthday today. And while websites can’t eat cake, the people who keep them up and running can, so we’re hoping that Larabel and his friends partake of some cake and ice cream today to celebrate all of the great work they do through the site.
Posts published by “FOSS Force”
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of May, 2016. 1. A Truly Easy New User Linux Distro? Let’s…
A familiar face to open source conference goers, Jono Bacon has left his post as director of community at GitHub after only six months.
Jono Bacon is no longer the director of community at GitHub. We wouldn’t fret for him too much. Something tells us he’ll land on his feet.
The only thing we know for sure right now is that there seems to be a bit of a shake-up going on at the popular code repository that he’s left behind. He made the announcement Monday in a post on his blog which leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
“Friday was my last day as a hubber,” he wrote, “and I wanted to share a few words about why I have decided to move on.”
After taking down the controversial DevShare program in early February, the new owners of popular software repository, SourceForge, have begun scanning all projects it hosts for malware in an attempt to regain trust that was lost by Dice Holdings, the site’s previous owners.
It appears as if the new owners at SourceForge are serious about fixing the mistakes made by the site’s previous owners. FOSS Force has 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.
Mozilla seeks user feedback with a new project that gives users a chance to take planned features for a test flight.
On Tuesday Mozilla announced a new program for Firefox that allows users to try features that are in the works but not yet ready for prime time. The news of the new program, called Test Pilot, came by way of a Mozilla Blog post by Nick Nguyen, the organization’s vice president of Firefox product. He said that the program will not only allow users an early look at yet to be implemented planned features, but will give Firefox’s developers a chance to get feedback from the community.
“When building features for hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide, it’s important to get them right,” he wrote. “To help figure out which features should ship and how they should work, we created the new Test Pilot program.”
Breaking News: Patched versions of ImageMagick now available.
FOSS Force has now learned that the ImageTragick hole has been patched in versions 7.0.1-2 and 6.9.4-0. Websites using ImageMagick are urged to upgrade.
Security researchers are reporting that cracker/hackers are currently taking advantage of ImageTragick, the easy to exploit security vulnerability in ImageMagick, a popular open source image manipulation tool used by many websites. However, so far the attacks don’t appear to be widespread.
FOSS Force has just learned from Wordfence, a security company that focuses on the open source WordPress content management platform, that a popular plugin used…
A security vulnerability in the open source ImageMagick graphics tool used by a large number of websites could allow a malicious payload to be executed onsite.
ImageMagick, an open source suite of tools for working with graphic images used by a large number of websites, has been found to contain a serious security vulnerability that puts sites using the software at risk for malicious code to be executed onsite. Security experts consider exploitation to be so easy they’re calling it “trivial,” and exploits are already circulating in the wild. The biggest risk is to sites that allows users to upload their own image files.
Information about the vulnerability was made public Tuesday afternoon by Ryan Huber, a developer and security researcher, who wrote that he had little choice but to post about the exploit.
On Tuesday, May 3, people in communities around the world will gather to take a stand against digital rights management.
Tuesday May 3 is International Day Against DRM, which for ten years has been an annual even to protest and build awareness about digital rights management. The event is sponsored by the organization Defective by Design, the anti-DRM initiative of the Free Software Foundation.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of April, 2016. 1. Five Linux Distros that Break the Mold by…