The H Week - A Narwhal approaches, custom Gingerbread & a record Patch Tuesday

In the past week, Canonical released the last development version of Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, CyanogenMod 7 brought Gingerbread to a number of Android devices and Fedora 16 got a name. Microsoft released a record number of patches, but had problems with one, and Apple released updates for Mac OS X, Safari and iOS.

Featured

In the latest edition of The H Half Hour, Editor-in-chief Dj Walker-Morgan spoke to Ross Turk, Talend's new Director of Community, about how the open core model works at Talend, and The H published part 1 in its Coming in 2.6.39 Kernel Log series, which looks at network drivers and infrastructure. On Friday, Glyn Moody offered a few suggestions on how to make Google good again.

• The H Half Hour: Talend, Open Core and Community
• Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.39 (Part 1) - Network drivers and infrastructure
• How to make Google good again

Open Source

The last development version of Ubuntu's Natty Narwhal arrived before its final release, while the end of life for Ubuntu 8.04 approached. Fedora 16 got a name, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server got a service pack and CentOS 5.6 was released.

• Final pre-release version of Ubuntu 11.04 arrives
• Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 LTS approaches end of life
• Fedora 16 named
• Service Pack 4 and longer support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• CentOS 5.6 now available

The Android hackers of the Cyanogen project released CyanogenMod 7 with delicious Gingerbread flavouring, but market researchers predict that Apple will hold onto the media tablet market until 2015. The KDE developers are working on a new mobile interface, Plasma Active.

• CyanogenMod 7 brings custom Gingerbread
• Market researchers: Apple to dominate media tablet market until 2015
• Plasma Active: KDE project for mobiles and more

Chip makers were talking open source this week: MIPS opened a resource site for Android and Linux developers, Intel showed its latest chipset for tablets ready to run MeeGo and Android and TI brought together its wireless solutions on the Openlink.org website.

• MIPS launch resource site for Android and Linux developers
• Intel formally launches tablet Atom at IDF
• TI starts open source web portal Openlink.org

Cloudera released a fuller version of its Hadoop distributed computing stack, MySQL got more memcached NoSQL in its stack and VMware announced its open source Cloud Foundry and hosted service.

• Cloudera releases third version of integrated Hadoop distribution
• More NoSQL for MySQL
• VMware announces Cloud Foundry

Groklaw announced the end of new articles appearing on the open source legal site, the nginx HTTP server reached version 1.0.0 after eight years of development, and having become part of the web production landscape, the Flock browser was discontinued and the remains of SCO were purchased by UnXis.

• Groklaw to cease publishing new articles
• nginx HTTP server reaches version 1.0.0
• Chromium-based Flock social web browser is no more
• UnXis takes over SCO's Unix business

Neo4J's new version switched from AGPLv3 to GPLv3, Mozilla's Firefox got an Aurora dev build and NTFS-3G merged with ntfsprogs to make a more complete package.

• Neo4J 1.3 graph database released under GPLv3
• Aurora: Firefox's new 'Dev' Channel launches
• NTFS-3G merges with ntfsprogs

Open Source Releases

• First stable Blender 2.5 series arrives
• Wine 1.2.3 update fixes bugs
• Google releases open source code for hash functions
• Parted Magic 6.0 drops "nice graphical boot menu"
• qooxdoo 1.4 JavaScript framework released
• HTML5 editor Maqetta to power competition with Flash and Silverlight
• Perian 1.2.2 update adds WebM/VP8 support

Security

Microsoft patched a record number of bugs and Apple's updates for iOS, Safari and Mac OS X blacklisted the Comodogate fake certificates.

• Microsoft's record Patch Tuesday
• iOS update for iPhone and iPad blocks fake certificates
• Apple releases Safari 5.0.5, Security Update 2011-002

Sony and George Hotz settled out of court in the Playstation 3 hacking case, three men were arrested in connection with the use of SpyEye malware and the FBI took over a botnet and started using it to remove its malware from infected machines.

• Sony and George Hotz settle
• Three arrested in SpyEye malware investigation
• Friendly takeover: FBI controls bot PCs

Facebook closed a mysterious Hotmail related hole in its password system, Dropbox's authentication token was found to be a little too portable, Barracuda Networks' application firewall went down and in came attackers and someone got root access to Wordpress.com's source code and possibly more.

• Facebook closes security hole
• Security issue found in Dropbox client
• Data theft at network security firm
• Break-in at WordPress.com

Chrome got an update to stop malware getting out of its sandbox, Safari plans to keep silent, when asked, about a user's activity and Android is to get more security options for it's business applications.

• Chrome update prevents escape from sandbox
• Safari is to improve privacy protection via "Do Not Track"
• Android: more security for business apps

A new zero-day emerged for Adobe's Flash Player which used Word documents with embedded SWF files to spread, Adobe said it is releasing an update on Friday. A second security flaw hit the VLC media player, in this case with MP4 decoding, and was closed with the release of VLC 1.1.9.

• New zero-day for Flash Player
• Adobe to patch Flash Player hole Friday
• A new security flaw hits VLC
• VLC Media Player 1.1.9 closes security holes

In other news this week: an application that hides your screen when someone looks over your shoulder, using DNS only to query Wikipedia and Twitter, ransomware that claims to be the result of Windows needing activation, the extraction of Airtune's private key from the ROM of an Airport Express and the first beta of the security through virtualisation OS, Qubes.

• Software to protect users from prying eyes
• DNS hacks with added value
• Ransomware claims to lock Windows licence
• Apple's AirTunes/AirPlay private key extracted and published
• Virtual security: release of the first beta Qubes OS

For 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.

(djwm)