The H Week

It's been something of a week for milestones; Debian had a birthday, Wikimedia passed a significant growth point and the largest computer fraud case so far moved into prosecution.

The H published two features this week, one on the recent HAR hackerfest and the second an article in our Health Check series on Mono, which has already proven very popular and even received a favourable mention from Simon Phipps no less.

Open Source news

On Monday The H published another edition in the on-going Kernel Log series dealing with storage and file systems in the up-coming 2.6.31 kernel; you can catch the previous editions on what's coming in 2.6.31 on The H's 2.6.31 Tracking page

Debian turned 10 years old this week and Wikipedia notched up 3 million English language articles. On Friday came the welcome news that the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation had granted the Wikimedia Foundation half a million dollars.

In the past, The H has carried several reports of Sony PS3 clusters with Linux installed as a second operating system being used to crack various security problems. On Tuesday Sony announced that the firmware for the new slimmed down PS3 Slim will no longer provide the option for installing an alternative operating system.

On Thursday The H Open Source noted the apparent disappearance of the mysterious Why the Lucky Stiff; the Ruby coder, writer, artist and eccentric has deleted all traces of his web presence.

After some consideration the openSUSE developers have now decided that openSUSE will ship with KDE as the default desktop, although GNOME remains as an alternate choice.

The Linux Foundation has been busy and featured in two of our stories this week; it published the August 2009 update of it's study into the development of the Linux Kernel and released a tool for testing the ABI compatibility of different versions of a C or C++ library.

Security news

Following last weeks report of a kernel vulnerability the various Linux distributions are responding and on Monday Debian and Fedora patches were released. Later in the week Ubuntu followed suite and Red Hat issued a work around for RHEL. Novell has yet to release patches.

Tuesday saw a report of a new type of virus, dubbed Virus.Win32.Induc.a by Kaspersky, that infects the Delphi development environment. Any program compiled with an infected version of Delphi will carry a copy of the virus.

One of the largest cases so far of computer fraud involving the theft of 130 million sets of credit card data moved forward into prosecution, following an arrest in May.

To see all last week's news see The H's last seven days of news and 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.

(trk)