01 December 2012, 07:00

The H Roundup - Fedora 18 Beta, Piwik compromise and getting a TAN

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item.

Top News

This week saw the long-awaited arrival of Fedora 18's beta, which added MATE and Cinnamon desktops to the forthcoming release. Meanwhile, Americans helped out building up OpenStreetMap in "Operation Cowboy" and, in preparation for next year's Firefox OS, Mozilla invested some of the non-profit's money in an Israel-based startup that makes an HTML5 Web App launcher.

The Ekiga "VOIP and more" application got a major update with the release of version 4.0, while the Java-based programmer's editor got better keymapping in its version 5.0 release. Google managed to update all versions and channels of the Chrome browser and Chrome OS in the week.

Often on the wrong end of finger-pointing criticism, NVIDIA has been working with open source drivers for the Tegra range of chips. A camera for the Raspberry Pi is heading into production, which should open the way for a new range of applications for the device. The regular Hardware Hacks column looked at, among other things, an Arduino-powered morse key which can send Twitter messages.

Security woes this week affected an iOS dictionary app, which accused customers of pirating the expensive app when they hadn't, and users of the Piwik analytics software, after a backdoor was planted in the .zip file for the software on the project's own site. Cheeky phishers also tried to get German users to photograph their TAN (one-time passwords) lists and send the pictures to them.

Featured Articles

With the approach of Linux 3.7, The H released the last two parts of Thorsten Leemhuis's Kernel Log previews of what is coming, specifically looking at drivers and CPU support. The H also released our Community Calendar for December 2012 so readers can find something to do as the holiday season approaches.

Developer Spot

The H's Developer channel has been running for a while now, and The H Roundup thought readers who hadn't seen it would like a brief look at some of the news. Oracle are pushing Nashorn to bring a modern JavaScript to the OpenJDK project, JSRs for Bean Validation and JAX-RS passed the Java Community Process bringing Java EE 7 a little closer, and the developer of JVM-based Redline Smalltalk is looking for funding to complete the open source modernised implementation of the venerable language.

Microsoft gave developers the first update for Visual Studio 2012, keeping a promise to accelerate the update rate, and Red Hat promoted OpenShift's PaaS as the latest entry in their enterprise portfolio. MongoDB developers decided to make the NoSQL database report write errors by default, and Amazon launched a Maps API.

Open Source Releases

This week saw new stable releases of darktable, Eucalyptus, Hysterix, CFEngine, Etherpad Lite, MariaDB C and Java drivers, and MSN for Firefox. There were also development releases of GNOME 3.8 beta, Firefox 18 beta and Kolab 3 beta.

For everything The H has published in the last week, check out the last seven days of news. To keep up with The H, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow honlinenews on Twitter. You can follow The H's own tweeting on Twitter as honline.

(djwm)

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