CBC News is looking out for your health and safety, by combining unrelated quotes by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, adding a Terminator image, and making sure you are well warned of the impending robot revolution. Here it is:

Two leading voices in the world of science and technology warn that robots equipped with artificial intelligence could be leading humanity down a dangerous path.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla motors, told a pair of CNBC reporters that he thought robots were "dangerous."

"There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator."

Despite his reservations, Musk himself has recently invested in an artificial intelligence company.

The first strike by the robots would be, naturally, to cripple humanity by operating on human unborn in the womb. That's a bad thing, no a good thing, no wait, now I'm confused.

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.

The question arose out of the urgency of the heartbleed OpenSSL bug and the hurried round of patching that ensued: what is the future of opensource security management, and what can we learn from this crisis?

Shrikanth RP, executive editor for Times India writes:

A recent report by Coverity found out that the quality of open source surpassed proprietary projects with a defect density of 0.59 per thousand lines of code for open source compared to 0.72 for proprietary code scanned. Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. The report mentions that nearly 50,000 defects were fixed in 2013 alone - the largest single number of defects fixed in a single year. More than 11,000 of these defects were fixed by the four largest projects in the service: NetBSD, FreeBSD, LibreOffice and Linux. So, what do these statistics mean for open source security, and how must organizations look at open source security post Heartbleed?

Better peer review, more atomic code commits and checks, periodic, 3rd party audits: what should we be doing to improve the quality of our code?

Mozilla's proposed CEO, Eich, departed due to his support of an anti-gay marriage proposition in California. But since then, nothing has changed, and Mozilla is desperately in need of some leadership at a time when its $300M/year deal with Google is coming to an end (Dec 2014, to be precise). Writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:

Today, months later, under the temporary leadership of acting CEO Chris Beard, Mozilla doesn't appear to be any closer to finding a new CEO.

In a June 3 blog posting, Surman wrote that one of the things on the top of his mind is "Finding the right balance between clear goals, working across teams and distributed leadership. If I'm honest, we've struggled with these things at [Mozilla] for the last 18 months or so. Our recent all hands in San Francisco felt like a breakthrough: focused, problem-solving, fast moving." How this will translate into true leadership remains an unanswered question.

What next for embattled Mozilla? And how to prevent the once mighty browser-giant from becoming the next Netscape?

Thank God for researchers. From Lavazza, the folks who make that spectacular espresso coffee :

"An espresso coffee is what I miss most aboard the International Space Station." We have repeatedly heard this comment from the Italian astronauts who for 13 years have been at times working in the International Space Station, and today their espresso wish is about to become reality. In fact, Argotec and Lavazza are working together with the Italian Space Agency (ISA) to actually bring the authentic Italian espresso onto the International Space Station. ... Its name is ISSpresso. It takes its name from the International Space Station (ISS), where it is to be installed. It is the first capsule-based espresso system able to work in the extreme conditions of space, where the principles that regulate the fluid dynamics of liquids and mixtures are very different from those typical on Earth.

This, my friends, is scientific progress.

Like KDE? Looking for something new and innovative? Have a look at KaOS. As described on its home page, KaOS is "A lean KDE Distribution", and it gives these as the ideas and principles behind the distribution:

• Rolling distribution
• Built from scratch (not derived from some 'larger' distribution)
• KDE desktop / Qt toolkit only
• x86_64 architecture only

Interesting to have a distro that's not just a remash of some version of Ubuntu, and the narrow focus of the distro means there are fewer moving parts to worry about. I'll be giving it a look over the weekend. Here is KaOS' page on Distrowatch. But J.A. Watson over at ZDNet does a pretty reasonable job of reviewing it this week, too.

PCWorld is running an article about the rise of quality games on the Linux platform .

For the first time in a long time, Linux gamers have a reason to smile. Gaming on the open-source operating system has long meant dabbling in Wine and arcane workarounds, but ever since Valve launched Steam for Linux just over a year ago the number of native Linux games has positively exploded.

Sure, Valve's embrace of Linux may have a wee bit to do with advancing the Steam Machine ideal, but any game released for "SteamOS" works just fine on other Linux distros, too. Here are 7 killer, big-name PC games that've recently become Linux natives-starting with a juggernaut that landed on Linux just this week.

Warning: it's one of those articles where you have to click 7 times to see all ten entries, but if you can stomach the format, it's a pretty interesting article.

With upheaval in the Crimea, Iraq, and elsewhere again overwhelming the news, the military and their hardware are again in the forefront of everyone's consciousness. Good time then to see what kind of tech soldiers are using or will soon be using on the battlefield.

Not surprisingly, the tech pioneered by Oculus Rift is extremely interesting to military planners . But as real life mirrors sci-fi and even comic books, it might be a surprise to see the military is now debuting an Iron Man suit to protect its troops .

If the junction of hardware and battle tech interest you, you'll be disappointed to know you just missed a big trade show in Paris where you could come browse the latest and greatest, presumably in the presence of hostile governments planning on using the same equipment against you! Don't worry, there will be others - the military market isn't going to disappear any time soon.