The H Roundup - Lying USB sticks, Ubuntu phones, Awesome 3.5

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

In the time between Christmas and New Year, a large group of hackers gathered for the 29C3 conference in Hamburg and discussed topics ranging from how to creatively use USB memory sticks to exploit computer systems and attack encrypted hard drives to turning cheap mobile phones into fully fledged GSM base stations.

• 29C3: When USB memory sticks lie
• 29C3: Successful attack on encrypting hard drives
• 29C3: Budget mobile turns into GSM base station

Canonical announced its big push to bring Ubuntu to mobile phones this week, competing with other Linux operating systems on phones such as Tizen which is being brought to market by Samsung. In other Samsung-related news, a security researcher published his findings about the lack of security on its Smart TVs.

• Canonical phones in Ubuntu for phones
• Report: Samsung is readying a Tizen smartphone
• Worth Reading: Smart, but insecure Samsung TVs

The FreeBSD developers released version 9.1 of their operating system and reported a resounding success on their fundraising drive. Meanwhile, a new version of the Awesome window manager was also released and good news surfaced from the Linux kernel developers regarding the open source Nouveau drivers and their support for NVIDIA's GeForce cards. Processor Whispers on The H explored the company's next generation of Tegra processors and bugs in chips.

• FreeBSD releases 9.1 and blows through fundraising target
• Awesome 3.5 arrives with modernised foundations
• Open source Linux driver supports 3D acceleration with all GeForce GPUs
• Processor Whispers: About Bugs, Bidders and Batmen

Featured Articles

Looking back on the year 2012, Dj Walker-Morgan and Fabian Scherschel picked out their personal wins and fails that happened in the open source space, adding to them the things that just left them unimpressed. Andrew Back looked at how affordable software defined radios could change the future of technology and what it means to consumers.

• The H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and Mehs
• One software radio to rule them all

Open Source Releases

This week, we saw new releases of Git, Simon, Cassandra, the KDE Software Collection, Font Awesome, MyPaint, an educational manual for the Raspberry Pi, an Amazon shopping feature for GNOME Shell, and a new version of Bodhi Linux.

• Submodule handling improved in Git 1.8.1
• Simon 0.4 begins listening
• Cassandra 1.2 arrives as foretold
• KDE releases January stabilisation update
• Font Awesome redesigned and relicensed for 3.0
• MyPaint 1.1.0 brings new colour harmony and geometry tools
• Educational manual for Raspberry Pi released
• Amazon shopping feature for GNOME Shell
• Bodhi Linux 2.2.0 ships stable E17 desktop

Security Alerts

• Critical zero-day hole in Internet Explorer - Update 2
• SQL injection vulnerability hits all Ruby on Rails versions
• Tchibo sells negative scanner with a virus surprise

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.

(fab)