• Open source algorithm helps spot social media shams

  Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University say they have developed an open source algorithm that can help spot social media frauds trying to sway valuable community influence.

  “Given the rise in popularity of social networks and other web services in recent years, fraudsters have strong incentives to manipulate these services. On several shady websites, anyone can buy fake Facebook page-likes or Twitter followers by the thousands. Yelp, Amazon and TripAdvisor fake reviews are also available for sale, misleading consumers about restaurants, hotels, and other services and products. Detecting and neutralizing these actions is important for companies and consumers alike,” the researchers wrote in a paper outlining their algorithm known as FRAUDAR.

  According to Carnegie Mellon researchers the new algorithm makes it possible to see through camouflage fraudsters use to make themselves look legitimate.

  According to Christos Faloutsos, professor of machine learning and computer at Carnegie Mellon the state-of-the-art for detecting fraudsters, with tools such as NetProbe, is to find a pattern known as a “bipartite core.” These are groups of users who have many transactions with members of a second group, but no transactions with each other. This suggests a group of fraudsters, whose only purpose is to inflate the reputations of others by following them, by having fake interactions with them, or by posting flattering or unflattering reviews of products and businesses, he said in a statement.

• Destroy to create: How one CEO innovates in object storage, open source

  While VMworld 2016 is now in the rearview mirror, some major partnership announcements emerged from within the conference halls. One such announcement partnered cloud and object storage company Scality, Inc. with hosting and Internet infrastructure provider OVH. This new go-to-market team-up will provide enterprises large and small a solution to handle large-scale storage needs.

  This partnership is just latest in a string of pioneering ventures at Scality since it opened its doors in 2008. To explore the company’s impressive growth and market strategies, SiliconANGLE recently spoke to Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality.

• Open Source Software & Security Are Key To 5G

  Open source software and security will be fundamental elements of 5G, according to top executives at the 2016 CTIA Super Mobility conference here.

  During yesterday’s opening keynote session, CTIA chairman and AT&T mobility president and CEO Glenn Lurie highlighted the role of open source software in the 5G roadmap. “We have to embrace open source, software-centric solutions. We know this drives flexibility and scalability with the growth of the network. It makes everything faster, better, and cheaper,” Lurie said.

• Yahoo's New Pulsar: A Kafka Competitor?

• Yahoo opens Pulsar 'pub-sub' messaging system

• Project Malmo available as Open Source: Use Minecraft for AI research [Ed: Microsoft is, as usual, openwashing the proprietary Minecraft]

• Open licenses don't work for uncopyrightable subjects: 3D printing edition

  Michael Weinberg (who has written seminal stories on 3D printing and copyright) writes, "We are seeing widespread adoption of copyright-based open licenses in 3D printing and open source hardware. This is great in that it shows that the culture of openness has really permeated the culture. It is not so great because a significant number of the things nominally licensed in these communities aren't actually protected by copyright."

  "This could create problems by 1) undermining long term confidence in open licenses when people find out that they are not enforceable when a copyright isn't involved and/or 2) creating a constituency of people who want to expand the scope of copyright protection in order to make their open licenses enforceable."

• Report: Students Can Save Thousands By Using 'Digital, Open-source Textbooks'

  A report related to a state pilot program has declared that college and university students from Vernon and across the state can save thousands with the use of "digital, open-source textbooks."

  The results of the pilot program were published last month.

  See the report here.

  The pilot program was created through Special Act No. 15-18, "An Act Concerning the Use of Digital Open Source Textbooks in Higher Education."

According to the U.S. Census, online retailers in the United States sold $97.3 billion worth of goods in the second quarter this year. That represents roughly 8 percent of all retail sales in the country during that time period.

If you're a small business owner, getting a piece of that market can seem like a very attractive opportunity. But setting up an online shop may be a daunting prospect if you aren't very technical.

In this article, we feature 10 ecommerce software solutions that can make setting up an online store easier. These are all open source solutions, which means that they are completely free if you run the software on your own server. If you don't want to host your own website, many of them are also available through hosting providers for a small fee.

• Yahoo open-sources Pulsar, a low-latency alternative to Apache Kafka

  Yahoo! Inc. has open-sourced a new distributed “publish and subscribe” messaging system called Pulsar that’s capable of scaling out while maintaining low latencies. Yahoo has long used Pulsar to back some of its own critical applications, and now wants the open-source community to help further its development.

• The CORD Project: Unforeseen Efficiencies – A Truly Unified Access Architecture

  The CORD Project, according to ON.Lab, is a vision, an architecture and a reference implementation. It’s also “a concept car” according to Tom Anschutz, distinguished member of tech staff at AT&T. What you see today is only the beginning of a fundamental evolution of the legacy telecommunication central office (CO).

• Synacor Launches New Support Program for 400+ Million Zimbra Open Source Users

• Getting started with Doctor, the CMS for Markdown documents

• California launches open source data portal

  California has launched a new open source, open data portal with 24 datasets that include information on the economy, transportation, water and other areas of interest for citizens and researchers.

  The portal, data.ca.gov, runs on DKAN, an open-source data management platform built by Nücivic, a New York-based software company. The tool is based on Drupal’s CMS and allows the user to decide what visualizations to show and create groups to organize data. DKAN was chosen after a competitive bidding process, according to Lynda Gledhill, a spokesperson for the California Government Operations Agency.

• Open-Source in Action: TOIL Research Team Improves on 3D Printed Prosthetics with Motor Ability, Tactile Feedback & More

No, I don't run FreeDOS as my primary system. That would really be impressive!

I run Linux at home. My laptop is a Lenovo X1 Carbon (first gen) running Fedora 24 with GNOME 3.

The tools I use every day include: Google Chrome, Firefox, and GNOMEWeb to browse the web; Gedit to edit text or simple code (such as Bash); GNU Emacs to edit program code (I prefer C); GNOME Terminal to SSH to my personal server and to the FreeDOS website; RhythmBox to listen to music.

I run FreeDOS in a virtual machine. I use DOSEmu if I'm writingFreeDOS code, so I can use GNU Emacs on Linux to write code and immediately compile it in FreeDOS via DOSEmu. That's really convenient because DOSEmu maps a folder in your home directory as the C: drive.

If I need to run FreeDOS as though it's running on hardware, such as testing the upcoming FreeDOS 1.2 release, I use qemu.