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26 February 2011, 12:00

The H Week - German FO drops Linux, Firefox 4 still delayed & Microsoft's malware malfunction

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From the dropping of Linux by the German Foreign Office to what went wrong at Nokia; from the latest moves on government open source to the latest delays on Firefox; from the latest releases to the controversial issues, they are all part of The H week...

Features

This week on The H, Oliver Diedrich took a look at the history behind the dropping of Linux by the German Foreign Office, Richard Hillesley looked at Nokia's history with open source and Thorsten Leemhuis's Kernel Log looked at the networking support in the coming Linux 2.6.38. The H also published March's community calendar of open source related events in the UK.

Open Source

A good week for open source and open standards in the UK public sector as the Cabinet Office defined open standards as royalty free, the Land Registry deployed Talend's open source data management and the NHS was encouraged to go open.

The latest version of Python, 3.2, arrived along with new releases of FreeBSD and WordPress, but Firefox 4 continued to be delayed.

The Document Foundation welcomed Canonical's work with LibreOffice and Unity but the Banshee developers were less impressed with Canonical taking a cut of its GNOME Foundation donations. The next Fedora will include the Sqlninja hacking tool, but the alpha for that Fedora release has been delayed. An open source driver for the tricky Intel GMA500 / Poulsbo chip-set appeared.

Novell's shareholders let the sale of the company to AttachMate go ahead but the patent sale is still delayed, Acer released a monitor that can run as a stand alone Chrome web browser and the class action against Sony and Linux on the PS3 stumbled.

Google's attempt to obtain summary judgement on the copyright portion of the Oracle vs Google Android case was denied, but at least Google eliminated the confusion about version 2.4 (there isn't one). Android 2.3.3 appears to have WebM support and the SDK for Android 3.0 was finalised. Meanwhile, a developer ported Nokia's Qt toolkit to the Android platform.

Open Source Releases

This week there were updates for VirtualBox, Fluxbox, Redis, LibreOffice and Cappuccino, while Ning Galaxy, a deployment system, made its debut as open source. Google's Native Client advanced, a new HTML5 framework appeared, Java 7 got a developer preview and the first beta of GNOME 3.0 turned up.

Development

Security

The fallout from Anonymous vs HBGary continued as fake identity projects were found, social networks got a site which listed zero day attacks, the police were called after vandals got into a UK universities medical database and researchers reported on the difficulty of effectively wiping a flash drive.

Microsoft released Service Pack one for Windows 7, mTAN attacking banking trojans turned up on Windows Mobile and Microsoft's submission on protection from web tracking was accepted by the W3C.

Security Alerts

The DNS application Bind was found to be vulnerable to a denial of service and Microsoft's Malware engine allowed local attackers to raise their privileges.

(djwm)

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