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GOING WAY BACK, pretty much all software was effectively open source. That's because it was the preserve of a small number of scientists and engineers who shared and adapted each other's code (or punch cards) to suit their particular area of research. Later, when computing left the lab for the business, commercial powerhouses such as IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard sought to lock in their IP by making software proprietary and charging a hefty license fee for its use.

The precedent was set and up until five years ago, generally speaking, that was the way things went. Proprietary software ruled the roost and even in the enlightened environs of the INQUIRERoffice mention of open source was invariably accompanied by jibes about sandals and stripy tanktops, basement-dwelling geeks and hairy hippies. But now the hippies are wearing suits, open source is the default choice of business and even the arch nemesis Microsoft has declared its undying love for collaborative coding.

But how did we get to here from there? Join INQas we take a trip along the open source timeline, stopping off at points of interest on the way, and consulting a few folks whose lives or careers were changed by open source software.

The GNU projectThe GNU Project (for GNU's not Unix - a typically in-jokey open source monicker, it's recursive don't you know?) was created by archetypal hairy coder and the man widely regarded as the father of open source Richard Stallman in 1983. GNU aimed to replace the proprietary UNIX operating system with one composed entirely of free software - meaning code that could be used or adapted without having to seek permission.

Stallman also started the Free Software Foundation to support coders, litigate against those such as Cisco who broke the license terms and defend open-source projects against attack from commercial vendors. And in his spare time, Stallman also wrote the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), a "copyleft" license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms - in 1989. Now on its third iteration GPLv3, it remains the most popular way of licensing open source software. Under the terms of the GPL, code may be used for any purpose, including commercial uses, and even as a tool for creating proprietary software.

PGPPretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption was created in 1991 by anti-nuclear activist Phil Zimmerman, who was rightly concerned about the security of online bulletin boards where he conversed with fellow protesters. Zimmerman decided to give his invention out for free. Unfortunately for him, it was deployed outside of his native USA, a fact that nearly landed him with a prison sentence, digital encryption being classed as a munition and therefore subject to export regulations. However, the ever-resourceful Mr Zimmerman challenged the case against him by reproducing his source code in the form of a decidedly-undigital hardback book which users could scan using OCR. Common sense eventually won the day and PGP now underpins much modern communications technology including chat, email and VPNs.

"PGP represents the democratisation of privacy," commented Anzen Data CIO and developer of security software, Gary Mawdsley.

LinuxIn 1991 Finnish student and misanthrope Linus Torvalds created a Unix-like kernel based on some educational operating system software called MINIX as a hobby project. He opened up his project so that others could comment. And from that tiny egg, a mighty penguin grew.

Certainly, he could never have never anticipated being elevated to the position of open-source Messiah. Unlike Stallman, Torvalds, who has said many times that he's not a "people person" or a natural collaborator (indeed recent comments have made him seem more like a dictator - albeit a benevolent one), was not driven by a vision or an ideology. Making Linux open source was almost an accident.

"I did not start Linux as a collaborative project, I started it for myself," Torvalds said in a TED talk. "I needed the end result but I also enjoyed programming. I made it publicly available but I had no intention to use the open-source methodology, I just wanted to have comments on the work."

Nevertheless, like Stallman, the Torvalds name is pretty much synonymous with open source and Linux quickly became the server operating system of choice, also providing the basis of Google's Android and Chrome OS.

"Linux was and is an absolute game-changer," says Chris Cooper of compliance software firm KnowNow. "It was the first real evidence that open could be as good as paid for software and it was the death knell of the OS having a value that IT teams would fight over. It also meant that the OS was no longer a key driver of architectural decisions: the application layer is where the computing investment is now made."

Red HatRed Hat, established in 1995, was among the first proper enterprise open source companies. Red Hat went public in 1999 with a highly successful IPO. Because it was willing to bet big on the success of open source at a time when others were not, Red Hat is the most financially buoyant open source vendor, achieving a turnover of $1bn 13 years later. Red Hat's business model revolves around offering services and certification around its own Linux distribution plus middleware and other open source enterprise software.

"Red Hat became successful by making open source stable, reliable and secure for the enterprise," said Jan Wildeboer, open source affairs evangelist at the firm.

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How open source took over the world - The INQUIRER

FRANKLIN, Tenn. (AP) - At a prostitution sting inside a New Orleans hotel, Franklin software engineer John Wagster took ample notes. Two teenage girls had been advertised online and the police officers he accompanied were after their pimps.

Wagster was well acquainted with the horrors of child sex trafficking. His employer, Digital Reasoning in Franklin, had been tapped by Ashton Kutcher's and Demi Moore's nonprofit called Thorn to develop software that would help law enforcement officers rescue victims more quickly. The Louisiana police were using Digital Reasoning's new software and Wagster wanted to refine it.

The software, called Spotlight, allows law enforcement to find online ads most likely advertising underage girls being trafficked and to significantly reduce investigation time. That means more time to find other victims and save more young girls. In the case of the New Orleans sting, law enforcement's first two calls proved to be girls controlled by pimps, Wagster said.

"They finished the night an hour ahead of schedule," Wagster said. "They were way more effective because of it."

Since launching in 2014, Digital Reasoning's software tool has helped rescue 6,000 sex trafficking victims, a third of whom are children. Spotlight is used by 4,000 law enforcement officers nationwide and it is now helping find victims in Canada.

"This is the most widely used sex trafficking investigations tool in the world," said Thorn CEO Julie Cordua. "You are cutting the time to get to this child almost by half but then also doubling the capacity of the existing officers out there doing this work."

Thorn, based in Los Angeles, was created four years ago by actors Kutcher and Moore to combat online child sex abuse. They observed an online marketplace rampant with escort ads, many of which featured underage teens and children. The massive volume of the online ads was hampering law enforcement's abilities to rescue victims, Cordua said.

Based on interviews with hundreds of rescued girls, Thorn had determined patterns that often show up when an ad is for a child, and the nonprofit sought to use computer software to identify ads based on those patterns. In search of a tech partner that could develop the algorithm, Cordua cold-called Digital Reasoning, which had been developing a national reputation for its cognitive computing methods.

"To their incredible credit, they said, 'Yes, we will do this with you,'" Cordua said.

Digital Reasoning President Tim Estes created the company in 2000. He was a recent college graduate and had developed software that could analyze vast quantities of communications. By 2012, when Thorn reached out to Digital Reasoning, the company had landed contracts with the federal government to assist with intelligence gathering and with leading financial institutions on compliance.

More recently the company, staffed with nearly 200 employees globally, has begun working with HCA on health care data. Since 2014, the company has raised more than $76 million from Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Nasdaq and other investors.

Estes said when the call came from Thorn, his team was eager to join their work.

"They showed us the chilling growth in exploiting children online that had happened in the last seven to 10 years," Estes said. "It was very compelling and became a big moral mission for us."

Bill DiPietro, head of Digital Reasoning's product management, and Wagster led the development of the algorithm, working with law enforcement in California and Arizona to study the challenges they faced and their methods. At the time, some law enforcement officers were using Google searches and relying on pencil and paper to find victims and set up stings, Wagster said.

Wagster, called "Wags," observed what clues agents looked for when scanning online ads and trained the software to automate that part of their search process. The software could then point them to the most promising leads.

"The whole goal of what we are trying to do is build software that can do some of the repetitive or redundant tasks on behalf of knowledge workers," DiPietro said. "Wags was giving them a list, here is the priority. If you are going to call girls, start here and work your way down. That was proving some of the success."

Spotlight does not replace the role of officers in any way, but it makes them more efficient, Wagster said.

"A big part of Spotlight is empowering officers to feel like they have the ability to pivot and to search through the data to come to their own conclusions," Wagster said. "It's about building a tool that lets them do their job."

Thorn raised funds from the private sector, including from the McCain Institute in Arizona, to build out the full application. The tools were provided to law enforcement agencies for free.

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, has made human and sex trafficking a focal point of his leadership through his End Modern Slavery initiative and praised Digital Reasoning's contributions.

"It is really helping solve the problem, saving years and years of work that it would take, in some cases, to apprehend folks," Corker said. "This is morally unambiguous and represents a threat to every community, and here they are."

At Corker's invitation, Kutcher gave a sobering testimony in February to the U.S. Congress on child sex abuse. During his address, he pointed to Digital Reasoning's role, as well as the value of private and public partnerships in solving this problem.

"The benefit of being a nonprofit and building these types of technology and being 100 percent privately funded is that we can move as quickly as we want and we talk directly to the officers and build what they need," Cordua said.

Amid the lengthy resume each of the Digital Reasoning leaders is accumulating, they have pointed to their work with Thorn as a high point in their career, if not their most meaningful project.

"Any time you get to work on being a mission-driven organization, it's very rewarding," DiPietro said. "Technologically, it's an interesting problem and a hard problem to solve. On top of that, it's for a great mission."

Cordua said Thorn is exploring further partnership with law enforcement agencies to improve Spotlight's capabilities with more data, including criminal records.

Meanwhile, new Senate legislation sponsored by Corker has been introduced in recent weeks to improve data collection and reporting on human trafficking crimes and to extend programs targeting the issue.

"We talk about rescuing juveniles, but there are a lot of criminals who are making money off those juveniles and only a fraction of them have really been prosecuted because we don't have that data," Estes said. "If we can connect that together, then that's the next story."

___

Information from: The Tennessean, http://www.tennessean.com

Excerpt from:
Tennessee company's tool has rescued 6K trafficking victims - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Here at Komando.com, we always scour the web far and wide for absolutely useful software tools that can help you become more efficient, productive and computer frustration-free.

We curate this selection intensively and test and scrutinize each download carefully to make sure it's safe and it's free from nasty extras like bloatware and add-ons you won't need. Needless to say, we use this selection of software tools ourselves!

To review our archive of Windows 10 software tools here's a great big list of the must-have applicationswe have collected so far.

Are you looking for software that will make you work moreefficiently? Then try these free Windows 10 productivity software we found.

The excellent productivity suite Microsoft Essentials was a must-have bundled download for Windows 8.1 and 10 users. However, Microsoft stopped offering it and discontinued its supportearlier this year. Fortunately,we found updated alternative apps that could replace the Essential Bundle -Microsoft Photos, Movie Moments and Open Live Writer.

Microsoft Word veterans looking for a Word alternative should feel right at home with the cloud-basedZoho Writer. It can even replace it for your basic word processing needs. Zoho even has a Microsoft Word plugin for tighter interoperability. Note: Writer is just one of Zoho's excellent productivity tools.Click here to learn more about Zoho's line of productivity software.

If you're looking for a way to stand out among the pool of job applicants, a great resume is a must. Try these 50 effective resume downloads from FreeResumes. The attractive, eye-catching designs were craftedby professional graphic designers who make beautiful digital creations for a living, so you know they're good.

Do you have a hard time keeping track of your household's finances? Then this free personal accounting tool Homebankcan help you out. This program can assist you with budgeting, planning and it comes with reporting tools to track where exactly your money is going and coming from.

Is your desktop a constant cluttered mess of open windows and tabs?AquaSnap may just be the lifesaver you're looking for. This free tool goes beyond Window's built-in multitasking features. You can quickly resize windows, stretch them into different shapes, and rearrange them, depending on what you need to do.

Previous Downloads

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Great big list of must-have software for Windows 10 - Komando

There was a time when anti-virus software was the height of computer security, especially if you were a Windows user. But the landscape of threats has changed, and we live in an era of sweeping, global campaigns, like the ransomware WannaCry infection and the more recent Ukraine-focused NotPetya attack. What role does anti-virus and antimalware software play in keeping your machine safe? We spoke with four security experts to hear what they had to say.

Across the board, each expert still recommends using software that protects your personal computer from attack. But modern anti-virus software is not the last word in defending your computer; rather, its part of a multi-faceted approach involving some common sense steps to keep your machine and personal information safe.

Bob Gourley, cofounder of the security consultancy firm Cognitio and veteran of the intelligence community, says that his company recommends that people install protective software, as it will mitigate the risks people face.

Theres a lot of security professionals who will point out that anti-virus software will not stop everything, he says. Thats trueits not the last line of defence. But it helps keep the noise down.

His specific recommendation is that Mac users may want to use Sophos, which has a free antimalware program, and that Windows users should think about Symantec. (I tried the free version of Sophos on my Macbook Air, and it detected a virus hiding in a text document attached to an email that the Mail app had downloaded. I deleted it.)

One issue that Mac users should keep an eye out for, according to Gourley? Adware. This type of code is typically picked up when using a software as a service, like email or other things that require logging into an account. FCC rules state that adware has to identify itself to prevent classification as "spyware," but it's easy to pick up some adware, especially if you speed through those terms of service agreements.

Like Gourley, Kurt Baumgartner, a principal security researcher with security company Kaspersky Lab (which makes products that defend against malware and viruses), recommends that individuals use anti-malware software.

While that may not be surprising advice from someone who works at a security company that makes anti-malware software, he also emphasizes the importance of keeping your computers other softwareespecially the operating systemup-to-date in the fight against malicious code.

Take the WannaCry malware attack, also known as WannaCrypt, which struck machines running Windows in May. Microsoft had already provided a software update about two months before, in March, that protected customers running operating systems like Windows 7 or Windows Vista from WannaCry. Machines that hadnt been updated or that were running older versions like Windows XP were left vulnerable. And Microsoft says that users who were running Windows 10, the most current version of the operating system, werent affected by that attack.

As for a recent attack last month, called Petya or NotPetya, Microsoft said in an article that most of those infections happened in computers running Windows 7.

Dont forget to keep your anti-virus software, like Windows Defender, updated too. The software can't fight a threat it doesn't yet know about, and that information is typically found in regular updates.

Tomer Weingarten, CEO and cofounder of security company SentinelOne, is lukewarm on the benefits of consumer anti-virus or anti-malware protection software. He recommends it as a better-than-nothing approach.

Right now, attackers have evolved much beyond the current protections that all of us can install, he says. Even if we keep up-to-date with all the signatures, and whatever mechanisms that they offer us, it still becomes very problematic for them to deal with unknown attacks.

As for the idea that the Macs and macOS is inherently more resistant to attacks, Weingarten is skeptical. Its really more about the fact that attackers are targeting the biggest bang for buck, and right now its the Windows system," he says. In short, Windows offers "more targets," according to Weingarten.

And while he emphasizes how crucial it is to keep your operating system updated, he also has another simple solution for people who may not be the most security proficient, and just want to do tasks like send emails: Use an iPad and a keyboard.

Thats because iOS, which powers iPhone and iPads, is the one operating system that we can say is inherently more secure, Weingarten says. The closed-down environment of iOS makes it impossible for someone to run foreign code on that device, unless, of course, it is through the highly-regulated official App Store. The only other way to run foreign software on the device would be if an attacker has a pricey and rare zero day exploit that could do so, meaning that a malevolent party has had found a way to exploit a vulnerability that has not yet been patched.

However, relying on an iPad or iPhone still doesnt protect someone from clicking on a malicious link that then takes them to a dummy site, prompting them to enter personal information. In other words, vigilance and common sense are still key.

In the movie Shrek, the films namesake famously compares ogres to onions. Why? Because they have layers.

Like an ogre (or onion), good security has layers, a point that Shalabh Mohan, vice president for products and marketing at Area 1 security, emphasises. Area 1 sells protection to companies against phishing attacks; phishing attempts happen when you get an email with a malicious link in it, or are asked to enter your username and password on a website that impersonates your banks, for example.

Mohan says that software that protects your personal computer (or endpoint, in the industry jargon) is just part of a layered approach. The first step, Mohan argues, is recognizing that phishing attacks are the most common way that attackers get into your system.

The next step is easy: being smart about what email service you use. Mohan points to both Google and Microsoft as good choices, because they help prevent phishing in their Gmail and Outlook.com email services.

Folks like Google, Microsoft have inbuilt controls and security that go way above what an end user could do themselves, he says, meaning that phishing emails may just get filtered out before they reach you. Anti-virus software like Sophos and other network security systems can also help protect against phishing attempts.

And for security-conscious people concerned about their entire home network, devices like a mesh-network Wi-Fi system from Eero, or the forthcoming Norton Core Router, bundle security protection together with a wireless network.

In short, perhaps the smartest approach to protecting your machine in the current climate is to install anti-malware software, but also to take other steps, too, like using a solid email provider like Gmail, keeping your operating system up-to-date, and being vigilant and using common sense against phishing attacks.

Finally, back up your data, so in a worse-case scenario in which a computer is infected by something like ransomware, a savvy user could wipe their computer, install the operating system from scratch, and then restore it from the backed-up version. Thats no fun, but its better than losing everything.

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Your anti-virus software is not enough - Popular Science

Customers are now being offered access to free recording, mixing, mastering and educational tools from the likes of Eventide and Steinberg when they register a product.

Audient has teamed up with companies including Eventide, Steinberg, LANDR and Producertech to offer a comprehensive selection of free creative software for all Audient customers, available in the new ARC 'creative hub', which launches this week.

Obtainable by simply registering a product on the Audient website, with ARC new and existing customers are given access to a range of free software for recording, mixing, mastering and education.

As part of the package, Audient is offering two free Eventide plugins: UltraChannel and UltraReverb (worth 350). Between them, the plugins can provide EQ, compression, delay, gates, reverb and more. Also available are Steinbergs Cubase LE and Cubasis LE2 (for iOS), which turn a Mac, PC or iPad into a compact Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), delivering audio recording, editing, MIDI sequencing and mixing tools for musicians, producers and songwriters.

In addition, mastering specialist LANDR has put forward eight free 16-bit WAVs and two free 24-bit WAV master credits at no cost to Audient users, while the two Producertech.com courses selected by Audient promise insight into compression and vocal production, as well as a 20 voucher to put towards further courses.

The concept behind ARC is not only to add value for our customers, but also to provide high-end software products that producers or musicians of any ability can benefit from on a creative level, said Audient marketing manager Andy Allen. As soon as you have registered your product, you can access ARC and download any or all of these amazing offers.

We have provided over 500 in creative software for our customers and all they have to do is register their product now and enjoy. If youre already a user of a current Audient product it doesnt matter if youve got an iD4 or a Heritage console grab your serial number and click through on the Audient website.

ARC

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Free software for Audient users through new ARC 'creative hub' - Audio Media International