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“It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”
- subudeepak 11y agoAny other projects affected ? Would be nice to start a list of all affected projects. This could also be a case of targeted attack on the gimp account.
- phkahler 11y agoOr you can just stop getting anything from sourceforge since their MO is now to distribute crapware.
- subudeepak 11y agoEven apache openoffice is using SourceForge for their downloads. There are quite a lot of s/w there at this moment.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoOpenOffice has not been relevant for a while; development has moved to LibreOffice. See https://lwn.net/Articles/637735/ https://lwn.net/Articles/637735/
- subudeepak 11y ago:) Agree on that ! [Have not used any office in a while now - Markdowns have been sufficient]
- makomk 11y agoThey're distributing LibreOffice now too, presumably without bothering to ask for the permission of the actual developers.
- yellowapple 11y agoThey technically don't need permission to perform the redistribution, seeing as LibreOffice is FOSS and distribution of software is permitted. However, they do need permission to claim to be representatives of the LibreOffice developers.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoAnd whether they need permission or not, bundling malware into the installer is evil.
- prokoudine 11y agohttp://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/ http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/ Nice list. Got Audacity there, for instance.
- subudeepak 11y agoThese are all affected repos ! Damn !!!
- psykovsky 11y agoBitcoin is on there also. Now that is worrying.
- prokoudine 11y agoIt doesn't neccessarily mean all of them are affected, but I think it's a call for a close inspection.
- psykovsky 11y agoI download the bitcoin .exe, and it came clean, with the right signatures, but who knows how they are distributing the stuff. I have a Ubuntu computer. If they're at least a bit smart they will use their download redirects to serve the spyware only to Windows computers or something, so that could be why I got a clean binary. Bitcoin devs investigated, at my request. They removed the sf-editor1 user from the project owners and checked the binaries to see if sigs matched, and they did. But like I said, they could be filtering who they serve the "spyware" to.
- SwellJoe 11y agoSeveral of those are projects that were never hosted at SourceForge, aren't they? Firefox, for example, I don't believe was ever an SF project. WordPress, I don't recall ever seeing on SourceForge. Are they altering the binaries they are posting on their "mirror"? This is very confusing.
- lvs 11y agoFirefox, cgminer, zotero, etc.. Yikes.
- patdavid 11y agoThe account that the GIMP-WIN project got "moved" to from it's official maintainer (jernej), is called "sf-editor1". Having a look through that accounts project history is a little fishy (http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/ http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/)....
- subudeepak 11y agoDoes not look like something they would have done intentionally. Explanations will come soon I guess.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y agoThe safest thing to do would be to assume that all software there is similarly afflicted and to never use Sourceforge again. People who host software there should move to a different platform.
- baldfat 11y agoThe only issue is that Sourceforge made nice binaries available. Most people have no idea how to use git and/or build their own binaries.
- ksherlock 11y agoEven before they started adding malware installers, downloads redirected through an extra ad page (and interfered with curl, wget, etc).
- ender1 11y agowget at least isn't affected, as long as you copy the link from the files page (the one that normally displays ads and a countdown timer in browser - it'll download the file directly with wget, since they apparently do user-agent sniffing).
- JohnTHaller 11y agoSourceForge has worked with wget, NSIS's inetc, etc for at least the last 10 years. We've been using it with PortableApps.com.
- hodefoting 11y agoThe official win32 gimp installers were not made by sourceforge, but by the GIMP contributor now locked out of managing the relevant sourceforge account. The same win32 installers that used to be provided on sourceforge are now provided from gimp.org directly http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/windows/ http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/windows/ the problem is the nice binaries being replaced by sourceforge made installers that also install adware.
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- Karunamon 11y agoWow. Is this legally actionable? Yeah yeah, their server and so forth, but pretending to be somebody is generally seen as a Bad Thing© by the courts.
- shiggerino 11y agoWhat's with the copyright symbol?
- Karunamon 11y agoA copyright that's been registered by Sourceforge ;)
- javawizard 11y agoBy which you mean a trademark?
- Karunamon 11y agoYou both are putting a heck of a lot of effort into nitpicking a single character used for humorous effect :/
- shiggerino 11y agoIt's worth nitpicking about, for several reasons. It would be a shame if a young entrepreneur thought their trademark was protected by the Berne convention and someone came and took it. It would be a shame if the Mickey Mouse lobby went completely unopposed because people can't think critically about what they don't know. It would be a shame if a large corporation could grab the trademark of a small free software charity because people don't think it's "a big deal".
- shiggerino 11y agoI don't see how the phrase 'Bad Thing' alone is a copyrightable work. And even if it was (say, it was typeset in a particular fashion, or part of a greater work), registration would be unnecessary. Sarcastic use of the trademark (™) and registered trademark (®) symbols is a common rhetorical device, but copyright doesn't make much sense. The "intellectual property" propagandists do their best to confuse people into thinking that copyright, trademarks and patents are the same thing, perhaps that's why you're confusing the two?
- j_s 11y agoReviewing the meager amount of Twitter chatter it appears SourceForge had cemented its irrelevance before this craziness.
- cillian64 11y agoIs there anything suggesting it's SourceForge itself doing this and not just (an improbably widespread, admittedly) set of account breaches? It makes sense -- acquire accounts, enable ads, profit.
- ksherlock 11y ago"The Open Source Mirror Directory is an extension to our existing software directory, where we'll be mirroring projects that are not hosted on SourceForge, and SourceForge projects that have been abandoned." Why are we doing this? We want the SourceForge software directory to be as useful as possible. When you come here to search for a piece of software, we want you to be able to find it, and find the most up to date releases. And if that software isn't hosted on SourceForge, we still want you to be able to find it. Or if a SourceForge project has been abandoned, we want it moved to the mirror and maintained, so you can always find the newest releases. Millions of people use SourceForge every day to search for Open Source software, and we want to give them the best experience possible, even if the best answer to their search is a project hosted elsewhere, or an abandoned project newly maintained by the SourceForge team. http://sourceforge.net/mirror/ http://sourceforge.net/mirror/
- SwellJoe 11y agoSo...they're claiming to "maintain" projects, and that means turning them into adware? That's so underhanded and nasty that it's difficult to believe. If true, it means SourceForge has effectively become the nemesis of every software developer who ever used their services. And, it means every software developer who cares about software freedom and privacy must move everything off of SourceForge. We host Webmin on SF.net, still, and it is downloaded over 3 million times per year, making it one of the most popular packages in the system administration category for over a decade (last I checked a few years ago, it was second only to phpmyadmin). They've never done anything weird or underhanded with our stuff (but most of our packages are signed and setup in such a way that fiddling with them would be somewhat challenging). Given its popularity, I would assume it would be a likely target for this sort of thing. But, maybe it's only "abandoned" projects? (Whatever that means, since it sounds like the original author in this case did not consider their project abandoned.)
- geofft 11y agoWhat are the reasons for people to use SourceForge today? Why hasn't everyone else (especially major projects like GIMP and Audacity) moved off? Here are some possibilities I can think of, but I'm curious if they're correct: - Mailing list hosting - Non-git repository hosting, for projects that prefer CVS or SVN - Shell account (though it doesn't seem very useful) - Features GitHub has but few others do (binary hosting, website hosting, etc.) and the project wants to avoid GitHub Are there others?
- JohnTHaller 11y agoOne reason is discoverability as they have a rather extensive searchable directory of open source software. Another reason for quite a while was binary hosting, which github originally supported, then discontinued, but finally added again in July 2013. Additionally, the ability to use any open source license or combinations of licenses, as Google Code supported binary downloads during the time github didn't but only permitted one license per project and only from a subset of open source licenses (originally a small subset, later expanded). Google Code, of course, is sunsetting now. And github now supports multiple licenses as well as binary releases.
- mzjs 11y agoGithub lets you use any license you want.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoRight. I meant it as a comparison to Google Code, hence mentioning it during the time period that Google Code supported binary downloads but github did not.
- krisdol 11y agoI will second the Discovery aspect as being something that I like about SF when I first used it in the early 2000s. The reason I liked it so much was because I was a kid looking for free games to play on my PC, who soon learned to equate opensource == free, who then started browsing SF's games category (played a lot of BZflag). That said, with projects and people leaving SF, and their UI leaving a lot to be desired, there are so many more options I'd first use for project discovery.
- jbk 11y agoOur VLC account has been taken too by sf-editor-1. Fortunately, we've moved to our mirror infrastructure since quite some time, and it's faster and way better. Btw, if any other open source project needs help to distribute their binaries (because of the size), please contact me. PS-EDIT: signing the installer was a good idea, I guess :)
- davidgerard 11y agoIs there anything you can do to stop them malwaring VLC?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- etix 11y agoThis is precisely for these reasons we stopped distributing VLC via SF.net in 2013. I even wrote about it: https://blog.l0cal.com/2013/05/02/rethinking-vlc-mirrors-infrastructure/ https://blog.l0cal.com/2013/05/02/rethinking-vlc-mirrors-inf...
- biot 11y agoHave you checked your site on an iPad? It's alternating the font size between small and large several times a second, resulting in a strobe effect that never stops. Yikes!
- walterbell 11y agoBizarre. Happens only in landscape mode.
- cmdrfred 11y agoI had those scammy sourceforge links, I guess I haven't been lucky enough to write a project that will scale that big but I'll host it myself until I simply can't afford it anymore. Vlc is great by the way.
- scrollaway 11y agoReposting what I wrote on the Reddit thread: I'm one of the lead devs of LXQt and an LXDE sysadmin. We use Sourceforge for our mailing lists and some LXDE legacy stuff. I'm absolutely sick of them. It's not the first time this has happened. I've been pushing for us to move off SF for a while and this is a good occasion to push for it harder. I've sent an email [1] detailing plans to move. I am urging everyone who still has projects on Sourceforge to do the same. If you have similar migration problems to solve as the ones I've highlighted in the email, please contact me directly and we can share the workload. My email is available on my Github profile [2]. [1] http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/mailman/message/34148903/ http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/mailman/message/34148903/ [2] https://github.com/jleclanche https://github.com/jleclanche
- kierank 11y agoThe number of people casually suggesting github for large binaries on HN is incredible and funny. They should try downloading something from github in Asia and they'll learn why local mirrors are useful.
- SamWhited 11y agoI'll still never understand why people don't move off of SourceForge; GitHub and Bitbucket (among others) are almost feature complete, and for the things that they're missing (mailing lists) there are plenty of free alternatives out there that are fairly easy to port.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoSourceForge made a blog post about the GIMP project here: http://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked-just-abandoned/ http://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked-... It appears they switched the GIMP project on SF back to directly downloading the standard GIMP installer, at least that's what I see right now in Firefox at 3:30pm NYC time.
- yoz 11y ago"Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers, and the original downloads are always available." In other words: "Yes, we take your project and wrap it in an adware installer."
- Someone1234 11y agoOr as I call it: "the download.com strategy." Honestly SF are scumbags.
- tdsamardzhiev 11y agoWell, if it's abandoned, just leave it be. Yobs!
- ajohnclark 11y agoI think this pretty much explains why this happened, a quote from their parent company here: "2005 - IN AUGUST, WE ARE ACQUIRED BY DICE HOLDINGS, INC., WHICH IS OWNED EQUALLY BY GENERAL ATLANTIC LLC AND QUADRANGLE LLC, PRIVATE EQUITY FIRMS IN NEW YORK CITY." via: http://www.dhigroupinc.com/our-company/default.aspx http://www.dhigroupinc.com/our-company/default.aspx
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- daveloyall 11y agoAs noted in other comments, the GIMP installer on http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/files/ is now bit-for-bit identical to the one on http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/windows/ http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/windows/ (let's call this one official). Does anybody have a copy of the "value added" installer? How did it work? Was it a wrapper which contained a copy of the official installer? Did it have the same filename? Was there some identifier in the URL? A cookie? In other words, can we programmatically identify other hijacked projects?
- makomk 11y agoIt was a small wrapper that downloads the actual installer, loaded from a different site to their usual mirrors because they outsourced the whole "bundling unwanted software" functionality to a third party. I don't still have a copy because I downloaded it in a temporary test VM, sorry.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoIt's a 730KB downloader installer as used by FileZilla, Angry IP Scanner, and other apps on SF that participate in the Dev Share program. You run it, it shows offers, then downloads the actual GIMP installer and runs that. I did a Virus Total scan of it earlier and the results are here: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/a63a337b0aa6b2686440802eb557a8d5e03567be78e4f6c2a239ca3076ebe43c/analysis/1432747594/ https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/a63a337b0aa6b2686440802eb... It seems they've disabled the ability for the GIMP downloader installer posted earlier today to be able to download GIMP now. Possibly so other sites don't distribute it further thinking it's the real GIMP installer?
- yuhong 11y agoI wonder what would happen if Google or Yahoo! acquired them.
- dm2 11y agoIs that enough to qualify SourceForge as malicious and ask that it be removed from Google's search results?
- hobarrera 11y agoIn this age of GitHub being huge, and GitLab being the purely open-source choice, this can't really end well for SF. They really really need to up their game if they want to stay relevant. Most of the stuff I find pointing me to SF these days is usually abandoned (GIMP and Pidgin are probably notable exception).
- unhammer 11y agoMore details: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/anatomy-of-sourceforge-gimp-controversy http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/anatomy-of-sourcefo...
- naveen99 11y agoPywin32 also should find a new home or maybe a reimplementation in golang.