The H Week - Faster password cracking and Linux 2.6.34 in testing

On The H this week; FOSS at CeBIT, Linux 2.6.34 in testing, new faces at the W3C and OSI, SCO vs. Linux continues, ZigBee hacking, SSD accelerated password cracking, smartphone malware and Mandriva's health checked

Featured

The H went to CeBIT and reported on the state of free and open source software at the European trade show and Mandriva got the The H's Health Check treatment. The latest Kernel Logs covered Linux 2.6.34 entering testing and looked at an analysis of the most recent updates to the Linux stable kernels.

• Health Check: Mandriva
• Kernel Log: Linux 2.6.34 goes into testing
• Happenings: FOSS at CeBIT 2010
• Kernel Log: Stable kernels analysed, Linux without firmware, new graphics drivers

Open Source

Simon Phipps, Sun's Open Source Chief Officer left Oracle and was elected to the OSI board while Jeff Jaffe took up the position of CEO at W3C. Fedora 13 saw its first alpha release and router specialist Buffalo announced it would be using the open source DD-WRT in a new range of Wi-Fi routers. The SCO vs. Linux story moved into court when an investor provided the funds for the company to go to court against Novell.

• Sun's Open Source chief leaves Oracle
• Simon Phipps elected as OSI director
• Jeff Jaffe now W3C CEO
• Rock it - The first pre-release version of Fedora 13 arrives
• DD-WRT to power Buffalo Wi-Fi routers
• SCO vs. Linux: The trial can begin

Open Source Releases

• Google open sources reMail
• Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 Beta 1 arrives
• OpenShot Linux video editor updated
• Elive 2.0 LiveCD Linux distribution released
• PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 1 released
• Android NDK with OpenGL ES 2.0 support
• OpenSSH 5.4 couples standard local input with server ports
• Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.1 Beta 1

Security

KillerBee, a set of security tools for testing the ZigBee wireless protocol was announced and researchers at Objectif Sécurité boosted password cracking performance with rainbow tables on SSD. Malware for smartphones is easy according to security specialists and Twitter announced measures to pre-emptively combat dangerous links. Secunia plans to integrate automatic updating for Windows programs into its Personal software Inspector utility and Symantec announced a partial shut down for the long running security news site SecurityFocus.

• ZigBee: attack of the killer bees
• Password cracker 100 times faster with an SSD
• Researchers show infecting smartphones with malware is relatively easy
• Twitter to detect, intercept and prevent bad links
• Windows tool to eliminate update hassle
• SecurityFocus to partially shut down

Security Alerts

• Dangerous security hole in Opera
• Update for Apache 2.2 web server closes various security holes
• Microsoft closes seven holes in Excel
• Attacks on newly discovered vulnerability in IE 6 and 7
• Exploit for new IE hole

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)