Open source, developer sabotaged two libraries

mark squires, A open source developer active in github, was intentionally distributed to update who which It corrupts two known libraries. Used by thousands of projects around the world causing many problems. The intention is Many companies opposeEven the biggest ones, who exploit open source code in their projects and then go on to pay millions of dollars.

Destroy the open source libraries colours.js and faker.js

More precisely, the two libraries involved are Colores. js, which is used to add colors to JavaScript consoles and has been downloaded over 23 million times on the NPM platform alone, and farsante.js, which is used to create fake data for demos and has been downloaded about 2.4 million times. Marak Squires will then update the code in the two libraries so that the US flag appears in non-ASCII characters. The text is presented with the words “LIBERTAD LIBERTAD LIBERTAD”.

Also, in the readme file in the faker.js library, the developer added the question “What really happened to Aaron Schwartz?” For those who do not know or do not remember, Aarón Schwartz It was a company and developer of free software. Since April 2011, he has been accused of downloading 4.8 million articles from the JSTOR digital academic archive with the intention of distributing them for free. He was later released on bail, but faced up to 50 years in prison. Always claiming innocence, he committed suicide in 2013.

The GitHub account di mark squires It was discontinued on January 6, after the corrupted update was merged with the faker.js library. During the same day, the previous version of faker.js was restored without the NPM “freedom” update. On January 7, it introduced the new version of colours.js, so it is unclear if the account is still suspended or not.

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