Search My Blog

Monday, March 19, 2012

SourceForge.net: Anonymous-os project response - We have therefore decided to take this download offline and suspend this project until we have more information that might lead us to think differently.

Anonymous-os project response

Posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 by Community Team
Category: Site News

SourceForge is dedicated to making open source projects successful. We thrive on community collaboration to help us create the leading resource for open source software development and distribution. We strive to be, above all, trusted, both by the developers working on software, and the people downloading that software. Without trust, Open Source fails.

Yesterday we starting hearing some buzz about a new project called “Anonymous-OS” - people claiming that it was not affiliated in any way with the group referring to itself as “Anonymous” (See Wikipedia for further discussion of that group), and also that the software itself was full of a variety of trojans, malware, viruses, or backdoors.

We looked at the project, and decided that although the name of the project was misleading (we see no evidence that it is connected with Anonymous) it appeared, on initial glance, to be a security-related operating system, with, perhaps, an attack-oriented emphasis. We have, in the past, taken a consistent stance on “controversial” projects - that is, we don’t pass judgement based on what’s possible with a product, but rather consider it to be amoral - neither good nor bad - until someone chooses to take action with it.

This is even discussed in our hosting documentation, in the terms of service.

However, as the day progressed, various security experts have had a chance to take a look at what’s really in this distribution, and verify that it is indeed a security risk, and not merely a distribution of security-related utilities, as the project page implies.

Read More...
http://sourceforge.net/blog/anonymous-os-response/

Thanks for watching out for us, SourceForge. I have trusted and downloaded from SourceForge for 10 plus years. And am very glad to know that you are watching out for Harmful Software, that could give we users, all kinds of trouble...

Don


SourceForge says no to Anonymous-OS project
Anonymous (group) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SourceForge says no to Anonymous-OS project | TechRepublic
SourceForge.net: Anonymous-os project response
Controversial project hosting – sitelegal
BBC News - Anonymous operating system prompts security warnings

No comments: