The H Roundup - Linux 3.8, frosty attacks and Steam for Linux

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, frosty attacks on Android, the MinnowBoard, a possible return of the Vivaldi tablet, Secure Boot news, Canonical releases a preview image of Ubuntu for mobile devices, Linux 3.8 is released, Steam for Linux arrives, Macs as attack vectors, and a detailed look at CQRS.

Top News

Two researchers from the University of Erlangen demonstrated how to access encrypted data on an Android phone by freezing it, an Intel developer unveiled the open MinnowBoard for developers and KDE's Vivaldi tablet is coming back with hardware from a new OEM.

• Frosty attack on Android encryption
• Intel pushes Atom-based MinnowBoard developer hardware
• Vivaldi tablet in harmony with new vendor

While UEFI Secure Boot support arrived with a recent update to Ubuntu 12.04, the Fedora developers have made sure that users can completely disable the effects of Secure Boot in their distribution.

• Secure Boot comes to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS
• Secure Boot restrictions can be disabled in Fedora

Canonical has released images to run a development version of Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets on Google's Nexus devices.

• Ubuntu for tablets and smartphones previewed
• Canonical shows Ubuntu Tablet experience

Valve officially launched Steam for Linux and celebrated the occasion with a sale of Linux games, Firefox 19 was released, and version 3.8 of the Linux kernel arrived with a range of improvements.

• Steam for Linux officially launched
• Firefox 19 brings PDF viewer and 4 critical security fixes
• Linux 3.8 released

Featured Articles

Thorsten Leemhuis took a look at what's new in the latest release of the Linux kernel, Jürgen Schmidt explored the recent attacks on Macs, Twitter, Apple, Facebook and others. Marco Heimeshoff and Philip Jander explained CQRS, a programming model that allows business logic to be developed separately from data provisioning for user interfaces and reporting.

• What's new in Linux 3.8
• Macs in the crosshairs
• CQRS – an architecture precept based on segregation of commands and queries

Open Source Releases

This week saw new releases of QEMU, the Sabayon Linux distribution, the FlightGear flight simulator, jQuery Mobile, the 3D animation package Blender, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, and Chrome, among others.

• QEMU 1.4.0 boosts large storage device performance
• More Perl in Texinfo 5.0
• Sabayon 11 with UEFI SecureBoot support
• GitHub's Boxen open sourced
• FlightGear 2.10 gets more realistic environmental conditions
• Sigil 0.7 EPUB editor's previews go live
• Tizen 2.0 SDK comes in "Magnolia"
• jQuery Mobile gets responsive with version 1.3
• Bullet Physics animates Blender 2.66
• Glimpse 1.0 enables server-side debugging
• RHEL 6.4 has Hyper-V drivers and Windows 2012 certification
• Chrome 25 arrives with speech recognition
• NetBeans 7.3 helps with web-centric development

The installer for Debian 7 has also entered the release candidate stage.

• First release candidate of Debian 7.0 Installer

Security Alerts

BlackBerry's Enterprise Server is vulnerable to an exploit involving TIFF files, Firefox 19 fixed 4 critical security vulnerabilities, Adobe shipped an emergency patch for Reader, and VMware caught up with some security issues with Java and OpenSSL.

• BlackBerry Enterprise Server vulnerable to dangerous TIFFs
• Firefox 19 brings PDF viewer and 4 critical security fixes
• Adobe's emergency patch for Reader
• VMware patches NFC, Java and SSL

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.

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