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29 September 2012, 13:59

The H Roundup - Ubuntu's Amazon search, GNOME 3.6 and Android resets

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The H Roundup 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

The week began with Canonical defending its addition of a new Amazon shopping lens in the current pre-release version of Ubuntu 12.10 following a storm of protest from users, after which the developers announced plans to add an option turn off all online searches.

The GNOME Project released version 3.6 of its free software desktop environment with a reworked file manager and other improvements, a prototype of a Wayland/Weston extension for rendering software remotely was demonstrated, and Adobe published an open source font designed for developers.

After a security researcher demonstrated how Android-based Samsung smartphones could be remotely factory reset using USSD codes, a number of other Android-based devices were found to automatically use injected USSD codes to, for example, cause a phone's SIM card to stop working. Users can see if their device is affected without compromising it by visiting The H's USSD check page at http://h-online.com/ussd from their mobile device; should the phone automatically display its 15-digit IMEI number, it is most likely vulnerable.

A modified version of the open source phpMyAdmin database management tool that was hosted on SourceForge was found to contain a backdoor, a new report showed that malware programmers have started to use Google's Go language and the company behind WhatsApp Messenger, which still contains a major security problem, threatened legal action against a PHP framework.

Featured Articles

This week, Thorsten Leemhuis took a first look at what's new in version 3.6 of the GNOME desktop, and Jürgen Schmidt detailed the problems with PPTP, while demonstrating how it could be cracked within a day for just $200 using an online cloud service. The H also published its Community Calendar for October.

Open Source Releases

The Folsom release of OpenStack arrived, version 1.0 of the GStreamer multimedia framework was released, and there were new versions of GTK+, GLib and Clutter. The Joomla CMS got a major update, the Exaile media player brought various improvements, and the latest release of the Pinta Paint.NET clone improved rendering performance.

Security Alerts

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.

(crve)

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