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Paypal withholds donations to TortoiseSVN-> 1

Submitted by maphew
maphew writes "Paypal arbitrarily decided to withold the donations made to the TortoiseSVN project via Sourceforge's "donate to this project". After several days and unfruitful biolerplate exchanges the project lead, Stefan Küng, finally managed to get the account restored, and thereby access the money. However Paypal made it clear that future donations are not allowed, with the threat that if there are any the account will be frozen again. The grounds Paypal gave for freezing Küng's account appears to be because someone used Paypal Singapore to donate to his project. There is an associated ticket open with SourceForge, #13993, about warning SF users. As yet there is no information from SF as to how they will respond to this troubling development (it's been 5 days).

There was a similar story 2 weeks ago, PayPal Withholding Indie Game Dev's €600,000 Account"
Link to Original Source

PayPal blocks TortoiseSVN donations->

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, PayPal blocked access to the TortoiseSVN developers to receive donations. The developers live in Switserland, but for some reason PayPal Signapore handles the Swiss customers and some law about donations in Signapore is related to the blocking. Why would PayPal do business from a country that has laws to screw their European customers?"
Link to Original Source
Businesses

PayPal Withholding Indie Game Dev's €600,000 Account 775

Posted by Soulskill
from the money-for-nothin' dept.
epee1221 writes "Markus Persson, a.k.a. Notch, the developer of Minecraft, posted on his development blog today that PayPal limited his account with unspecified cause on August 25th. Since then, payments for the alpha version of Minecraft have continued accumulating while Notch has been unable to withdraw them, and the account now contains over €600,000. PayPal recently told him it may take up to two more weeks for things to get sorted out and that if they conclude that there is funny business involved, they will keep the money." This unfortunate news followed an announcement a few days ago that he and a friend would be starting a studio of their own to continue development on Minecraft and start working on a new project.
Software

SPAM: TWiki is dead, long live Foswiki - Foswiki 1.0.0 2

Submitted by
Eugen Mayer
Eugen Mayer writes "I am absolutely thrilled. It has been some time since i reported on the situation with TWiki and the fork. That does not mean there is nothing to report, though! With the first release (1.0.0), Foswiki establishes itself firmly in the marketspace. TWiki is dead, long live Foswiki!

So for those who have not kept up to date, let me summarize the preceding events. It all started 10 years ago, when Peter Thoeny decided to create a fork of JosWiki, and named it TWiki. TWiki developed into a very powerful structured wiki platform, mainly with the help of many volunteers. Lately, Thoeny stopped development contributions, and focussed mainly on pr. Around a year ago, he decided to found a company called TWiki.NET, a venture capital in the silicon valley.

The company promptly decided to take over the entire open source project, claiming it as theirs even though Thoenys code contributions to the actual product had been minimal for years at that point. Additional trademark enforcement rules didnt improve things. After months of strife, the project halted. Thoeny declared himself benevolent dictator for life, but did not show any benevolence in his dealings with the volunteer community. The culmination came in october 2008, with the lock-out of all current community members from the community site by TWiki.NET. This sparked the fork, first under the working-name Nextwiki and later under the permanent name Foswiki. The Foswiki website contains some background reading.

Rollercoaster ride

The fork took us community members on a rollercoaster-ride. We had to duplicate the project infrastructure that was built up over years on twiki.org, which we managed to do in just one or two weeks. Within moments, a new skin for the TWiki software was designed and implemented, and over the last few months we have had many emails supporting us in our actions. Developers that had been inactive for years because of the dictatorial regime Thoeny imposed on the project suddenly became interested again, new developers decided to join sparked by the radical change of direction.

Seeing the number of developers, designers, user-intraction experts and other contributors that went with the fork, it is reasonable to state that Foswiki is in fact the TWiki project, just under a new name. What is left under twiki.org, the original project website, is mostly a front for the struggling company TWiki.NET. Even though Thoeny keeps boasting the number of people that agreed to the new policy for using twiki.org, the number of actual contributions is very low, and mostly limited to contributions by Thoeny himself and one of his employees.

Meanwhile, in the short period since the fork (about 2.5 months) Foswiki has seen a staggering number of 1900 checkins, a lot of new content on the Foswiki community site, a lot of passionate discussions on the mailing lists and irc channels, and generally the feeling that we are rolling again! The crown on this work for me personally has been when earlier this week I mothballed the TWiki installation on foswiki.org, and replaced that with the Foswiki release candidate, including a port of the new skin-design to Foswiki pattern skin. An important milestone indeed.

New features, security audit and painless migration

That is all very well, and it is easy to gloat in the aftermath of the destruction that Thoeny wrought on the TWiki project. Of course it is not all roses and moonlight (a Dutch expression I believe), Thoenys actions have left the user-community in a split: should we stay with what is renamed to Foswiki, or should we go with the new TWiki. Of course, only in retrospect will we be able to determine what the right course of action would have been. However, given the above considerations, it is likely that users interested in innovation are wise to go with Foswiki.

Foswiki is based on an innovative new base architecture for example; as a result Foswiki can be run under FastCGI, a great step forward. Additionally, performance under mod_perl is improved. The same architecture (called FSA, short for Foswiki Stand Alone) makes it possible to run Foswiki as a stand-alone server, without the need of a webserver such as Apache. This is great for setting up a personal Foswiki on your laptop for example, or for using Foswiki in a more CMS-like fashion with agressive caching between the user and the FSA instance.

Other notable features are an improved search dialogue, giving the user much more flexibility and google-like boolean search operators. The venerable pattern-skin has been given a facelift, and is easier to customize.

And last but not least: much attention has been given to the security of the software. A lot of vectors for remote code injection have been identified and plugged, and other features have been made secure by default, eliminating the risk that a Foswiki application programmer might accidently introduce XSS issues. A further hundred-plus number of bugs have been fixed.

The Foswiki community considers concerns of current TWiki users very seriously. Migration is fairly painless, with the availability of a TWikiCompatibilityPlugin. A pure foswiki does not contain any TWiki-isms (such as the TWikiPreferences page) and all plugin functions are placed under the Foswiki namespace instead of the TWiki namespace. This would provide troublesome with legacy TWiki applications and plugins. The compatibility plugin makes those twiki-isms available under Foswiki, enabling old content and plugins to be used without a hitch.

The future

This is where i gather my crystal ball, and gaze at fuzy pictures of what is to come. Given that TWiki is now basically a two-man show, i think they will have a hard time supporting existing users. Both in development, where only one developer struggles to keep up with fixing reported bugs, as in end-user support. Thoeny is trying to single-handedly support the entire user base. Contrary to that situation, Foswiki has a thriving community behind it.

In an earlier post, i voiced the suspicion that TWiki.NET might become more like MySQL: a community of hired developers, with a product that is developed mostly as a commercial application and a floss version that is lagging behind in features as an afterthought. However, TWiki.NET will need money to build that hired community, and so far it does not seem they have the capital to follow through on that thought. Their ideal is the ubuntu model, their only problem is that they do not have the multi-millionaire to invest in endeavours that bring no profit.

I am biased, but I am convinced that Foswiki will prevail and TWiki will slowly die out. And without the vibrant community that made the product, the company that forced a resolution of the persisting stalemate that had locked up the community for years, will turn out to be an empty shell.

TWiki is dead, long live Foswiki!"
Link to Original Source
Announcements

SDF Public Access UNIX System Celebrates 20 Years->

Submitted by
Stephen Jones
Stephen Jones writes "The SDF Public Access UNIX System Celebrates 20 Years!
http://sdf.lonestar.org/

It was on June 16th, 1987 that the SDF-1 received its first caller at
300bps. This little Apple ][e BBS of the late 80s turned into a Public
Access UNIX System with the demise of "killer.dallas.tx.us" during the
"Operation Sundevil" raids. Since then it has grown to become the oldest
and largest continually operating PUBNIX on the planet."
Link to Original Source
Unix

SDF Public Access Unix System Turns 20->

Submitted by Eileen
Eileen writes "Remember those days when you could get a free Unix shell account and learn all about the command line? You still can at the Super Dimension Fortress (SDF). SDF is celebrating its 20th birthday on June 16.

Full press release text:
The SDF Public Access UNIX System Celebrates 20 Years!
http://sdf.lonestar.org


It was on June 16th, 1987 that the SDF-1 received its first caller at 300bps. This little Apple ][e BBS of the late 80s turned into a Public Access UNIX System with the demise of "killer.dallas.tx.us" during the "Operation Sundevil" raids. Since then it has grown to become the oldest and largest continually operating PUBNIX on the planet.

Over the years SDF has been a home to 2+ million people from all over the world and has been supported by donations and membership dues. SDFers pride themselves on the fact that theirs is one of the last bastions of "the real INTERNET", out of the reach and scope of the commercialism and advertising of the DOT COM entities. It is a proponent of SMTP greylisting as opposed to content filtering and offers that as an option to its members.

While access to basic services are free to everyone, lifetime membership can be obtained for a mere onetime donation of $36. And it is the members who decide which programs and features are available. The members communicate via a web free, google inaccessible, text bulletin board ('bboard') as well as an interactive chat ('com') where users battle each other in the integrated netris matches. The interface of these programs harks back to the days when TOPS-20 CMD J-SYS ruled the ARPANET.

SDF has also become home to well known hackers such as Bill Gosper, Tom Ellard (Severed Heads), Geoff Goodfellow, Carolyn Meinel and Ezra Buchla, son of the father of the Synthesizer. From this pool of talent you might expect more than just computing, and you'd be correct. An annual music compilation is published featuring original music ranging from electronic noise to improvised piano sonatinas. Gosper's puzzles which he has cut at his favorite laser shop are frequently given away as membership perks or through fundraising raffles.

There are always classes being taught on SDF as well, where instructors and students enjoy free access to the latest teaching and programming tools. Instructors manage their own classes in such a way as not to be encumbered by their own school's outdated utilities or computer security restrictions, which can hamper the learning process.

And where else would you expect to be able to locally dialup at 1200bps from just about anywhere in the USA and Canada with a Commodore 64 and get a login prompt? SDF! As well as direct login, SDF offers PPP and PPPoE via analogue dialup (1200bps — 56kbps), ISDN and DSL. Members also have access to the SDF VPN (Virtual Private Network) and Dynamic Domain Name Service.

One of the many interesting and esoteric aspects of life on the SDF-1 is GOPHER. All users have access to their own GOPHER space and a number of them continue to find it a useful way to share text and data. And if you don't want to relive that past, SDF's 'motd.org' project offers a collaboration amongst members to share source and security tweaks for the latest wikis, web forums, photo galleries and blogs.

SDF runs NetBSD on a cluster of 12 DEC alphas with 3 BGP'ed T1s linking it to the INTERNET. It is an annual supporter of the NetBSD foundation and the Computer History Museum (CA). One of its original incarnations, an AT&T 3B2/500, is displayed annually at the Vintage Computer Festival."
Link to Original Source

Say something you'll be sorry for, I love receiving apologies.