23 March 2013, 11:59

The H Roundup - Hacking cameras, mapping botnets and Easter Wheezy?

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. This week, cameras and networks were hacked, botnets went mapping the internet, Ubuntu support was shortened as 13.04 neared, MongoDB got full text searching and a Python disagreement was settled. Also - The H took a look at Dell's Ubuntu laptop and asked what now after Android?

Site News

This week, we introduced a new sharing bar for social media. We also made sure we protected your privacy by blocking the beacon behaviour of many common sharing buttons until you, the reader, unlock it for sharing. Read more about this, and how you can get the open source code to implement it on your own site in Two clicks for more privacy.

Features

Thorsten Leemhuis put Dell's Ubuntu-loaded developer laptop through its paces, Glyn Moody asked if Android's success is actually good for open source software in general, and The H Community Calendar tells you where the open source and developer communities are meeting next month.

News

Security and hacking were popular topics in the past week, from the map of the internet built by hacking together a botnet to numerous ways of coercing cameras of various types to act as snoops and spies. There was also the laptop dock packed with a Raspberry PI, a GSM module which could tap any docked laptop, and the discovery that Huawei 3G/4G USB sticks were a little insecure. It was also discovered that another attack on SSL/TLS RC4 encryption could yield results.

Meanwhile, in the world of open source and free software, the Canonical and Ubuntu developers decided to cut down the time they spend supporting non-long-term-support Ubuntu releases and passed the beta 1 milestone for the next Ubuntu release, 13.04. LXLE, an Ubuntu/Lubuntu derivative arrived to breathe life into older hardware. Legal tussles were also in the news: a new JavaScript charting package by the name of Chart.js appeared, then disappeared, then reappeared again and the Python Software Foundation found an amicable settlement with a UK-based company using the Python name.

Looking forward, the tea leaves could be pointing towards an Easter release for Debian 7.0, KDE developers are focused on Wayland support, Android support is coming to Qt 5.1, and in a few weeks, you'll be made to install service pack one on Windows 7.

Interesting releases of the week included full-text searching in MongoDB, a refreshed Smalltalk environment, version 1.0 of the popular JavaScript framework Backbone, the first release of KDE Plasma Media Center, and the virtual machine manager Vagrant got an update and the ability to control VMware Fusion VMs.

Other Open Source Releases

This week sees a new BPM platform, updates to Shotwell and Geary, a hole fixed in Etherpad, fixes to Virtualbox, improvements to the Xtend language, and a better GParted. Basho has open sourced the Riak storage system, FreeNAS introduced full disk encryption, and Ruby on Rails fixed security holes. We also saw the release of two open source audio frameworks for iOS, the Firefox Nightly builds introduced a way to speed up the execution of JavaScript, the first beta of PHP 5.5 arrived and QtCreator improved C++11 and Blackberry support.

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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