The H Roundup for the week ending 21 July

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

A security hole was discovered in Amazon's Kindle Touch ebook reader that lets the browser execute arbitrary shell commands with root privileges. Linus Torvalds published what should be the final release candidate for the Linux kernel 3.5 which is now expected to be released this weekend.

The H also took a look at some of the recent developments around the Raspberry Pi mini-computer, including an unmanned autonomous boat, mini-satellites powered by the device, and a new breakout box, while the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched a new version of its Debian-based distribution called "Raspbian".

In other news, the Linux Foundation announced the winners of its annual T-shirt contest and The H looked at improvements in Android 4.1's security.

• Security hole in Amazon's Kindle Touch
• Linux 3.5 approaches with RC7
• Hardware Hacks: The Raspberry Pi is everywhere
• Raspberry Pi Foundation launches Raspbian distribution
• Linux Foundation announces T-shirt design contest winners
• GParted update brings refresh of live CD partitioning tools
• NVIDIA hackers publish user data
• Valve officially announces Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 for Linux
• Android 4.1 Jelly Bean includes proper address randomisation
• XBMC for Android set-top boxes is coming soon

Featured Articles

This week, Andrew Back dove into how free and open a typical mobile phone is, Dj Walker-Morgan interviewed Azul Systems CTO Gil Tene about jHiccup, and Richard Hillesley took a look at French Linux company Mandriva and its recent attempts to reboot itself.

• How free is my phone?
• Java hiccups and how to beat them
• Healthcheck Mandriva - Rebooting the company

Open Source Releases

• GParted update brings refresh of live CD partitioning tools
• Firebug 1.10 released with new cookie manager
• Geronimo 3.0 supports Java 7
• First 64-bit edition of VectorLinux 7.0 now available
• Apache Tika 1.2 introduces new network server
• FreeBSD 9.1 enters beta
• Firefox 14 introduces HTTPS search by default - Update
• Critical holes closed in Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
• Thunderbird 14 arrives with bug fixes
• RedPhone voice encryption system for Android open sourced
• Komodo 7.1 lets users add their own language support
• SystemRescueCd update includes version 2.00 of GRUB
• Raspberry Pi Foundation launches Raspbian distribution
• HP's Enyo 2.0 application framework released
• Miranda IM messaging client adds Yahoo conference support

Security Alerts

• German EC cards: PINs can be stolen at card terminals
• Critical holes closed in Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
• Oracle's July patch day brings 87 security updates
• Urgent security update for TeamViewer

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)