An anonymous reader writes: Wladimir Palant is the creator of the Adblock Plus browser extension, but he often gets asked how it compares to a similar extension for Chrome called Adblock. In the past, he's told people the two extensions achieve largely the same end, but in slightly different ways. However, recent changes to the Adblock project have him worried. "AdBlock covertly moved from an open development model towards hiding changes from its users. Users were neither informed about that decision nor the reasons behind it." He goes through the changelog and highlights some updates that call into question the integrity of Adblock. For example, from an update on June 6th: "Calling home functionality has been extended. It now sends user's locale in addition to the unique user ID, AdBlock version, operating system and whether Google Search ads are being allowed. Also, AdBlock will tell getadblock.com (or any other website if asked nicely) whether AdBlock has just been installed or has been used for a while — again, in addition to the unique user ID." Of course, Palant has skin in this game, and Adblock Plus has dealt with fallout from their "acceptable ads policy," but at least it's still developed in the open.

Back in 2009, OKLabs/NICTA announced the first formally verified microkernel, seL4 (a member of the L4 family). Alas, it was proprietary software. Today, that's no longer the case: seL4 has been released under the GPLv2 (only, no "or later versions clause" unfortunately). An anonymous reader writes OSnews is reporting that the formally verified sel4 microkernel is now open source: "General Dynamics C4 Systems and NICTA are pleased to announce the open sourcing of seL4, the world's first operating-system kernel with an end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement. It is still the world's most highly assured OS." Source is over at Github. It supports ARM and x86 (including the popular Beaglebone ARM board). If you have an x86 with the VT-x and Extended Page Table extensions you can even run Linux atop seL4 (and the seL4 website is served by Linux on seL4).

cold fjord (826450) writes with an excerpt from ZDNet At OSCon, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ... quietly announced that they're now offering a service for checking out your open-source code for security holes and bugs: the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP). ... Patrick Beyer, SWAMP's Project Manager at Morgridge Institute for Research, the project's prime contractor, explained, "With open source's popularity, more and more government branches are using open-source code. Some are grabbing code from here, there, and everywhere." Understandably, "there's more and more concern about the safety and quality of this code. We're the one place you can go to check into the code" ... funded by a $23.4 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), SWAMP is designed by researchers from the Morgridge Institute, the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Each brings broad experience in software assurance, security, open source software development, national distributed facilities and identity management to the project. ... SWAMP opened its services to the community in February of 2014 offering five open-source static analysis tools that analyze source code for possible security defects without having to execute the program. ... In addition, SWAMP hosts almost 400 open source software packages to enable tool developers to add enhancements in both the precision and scope of their tools. On top of that the SWAMP provides developers with software packages from the National Institute for Standards and Technology's (NIST) Juliet Test Suite. I got a chance to talk with Beyer at OSCON, and he emphasized that anyone's code is eligible — and that there's no cost to participants, while the center is covered by a grant.