Wow - This is big. The New York Times has selected the folks from Mozilla to develop their new comment and contribution system.

The New York Times and The Washington Post announced on Thursday that they had teamed up with Mozilla to develop a new platform that will allow them to better manage their readers' online comments and contributions. The platform will be supported by a grant of roughly $3.9 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization that gives substantial money to promote journalism innovation.

Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser and a nonprofit that works for open standards on the web, will help The Times and The Post build the technology for a platform tailored to news organizations. The platform, which will take approximately two years to complete, will eventually be available for other news organization to download free.

Looks like opportunity in many senses: a chance to rethink online commenting, a chance for Mozilla to make a buck, and a chance to put an axe in the head of "Sign into Facebook to comment" type approaches. Me, I would've recommended they install Pipecode. But hey.

You might remember Freshmeat, a hacker site whose name was changed in 2011 to FreeCode (to me, it will always be Freshmeat). Freshmeat kept track of software packages, their newest versions, change logs, and updates. For project developers, it was a great way to get the word out about improvements to their software. For users, it was a spectacular way to search for and discover interesting and useful software. While not totally devoted to open source software, the bulk of the software was for Unix and Linux systems, and much of it was open source.

In 2012, FreeCode was bought by Dice Holdings, along with Slashdot and the rest of Geeknet's sites, for $20M. Two years later (ie, yesterday), it was dead in the water.

As of yesterday, visitors to Freecode.com will see "Effective 2014-06-18 Freecode is no longer being updated (content may be stale)." Turns out, Freecode.com wasn't generating enough revenue via page impressions of ads, and Dice Holdings decided to stick a knife in its heart, explaining:

The Freecode site has been moved to a static state effective June 18, 2014 due to low traffic levels and so that folks will focus on more useful endeavors than site upkeep. The site contents have been retained in this static state as a continued path to access the linked software, much of which is on self-hosted servers and would be difficult to find otherwise.

It might seem better than nothing to just freeze FreeCode into a static site, but a site whose purpose is to track the latest and greatest is dead in the water if all of its information was frozen on 18 June. Rest in Peace, Freshmeat. [ed. note: Is it now rotten meat? Because I see flies on the carcass].

This story comes from CNet, who has dumbed the story down in a way that makes it a bit hard to understand [ed note: ironic]. But it appears security researchers have reverse engineered over 880,000 of the Android app store's 1.1M free apps, and found a number of important security concerns .

The first concern is the existence of hard coded keys, which the article claims "username and password data -- which can then be used to steal user data or resources from entities such as Amazon and Facebook." That's not well explained, but that's CNet for you.

The second concern isn't so much a security issue as further evidence that the Android app store could use some better curating: the researchers discovered that roughly 25% of Android free apps are simply clones of other apps.

The researchers used a tool called "PlayDrone" which circumvents the App store's procedures to download apps and reverse engineer them to acquire source code. The source article at Columbia University is better , or PlayDrone yourself over at Github. A bit of nice work by researchers Jason Nieh and Nicolas Viennot.