07 August 2010, 11:59

The H Week - Linux 2.6.35, CSI:Internet episode 4

In the past week, The H took an in-depth look at the latest 2.6.35 Linux kernel and published the latest episode of the CSI:Internet series. Google announced that it would discontinue its Wave collaboration tool, Android overtook BlackBerry sales in the US and KDE SC 4.5 was delayed. A record Microsoft patch day is coming, a new PDF vulnerability allows for iPhone jailbreaking and AV vendors aren't using Windows exploit protection features.

Featured

Following the release of the latest version of the Linux kernel early this week, The H published its customary in-depth feature on what's new in Linux 2.6.35. Later in the week, The H posted episode 4 in the CSI:Internet security series and Richard Hillesley took a look at the issues around copyright assignment and free software.

Open Source

This week saw the arrival of the latest 2.6.35 Linux kernel, Illumos launched an OpenSolaris derivative aimed at creating an open source baseline for future distributions and the code for the AppArmor security extension was integrated into the latest development branch of the kernel. Google announced it was discontinuing Wave and a survey by Accenture showed that investment in open source is on the rise. Reports from research firm Canalys showed that worldwide shipments of smartphones running Google's Android OS increased by 886% in Q2, ACCESS joined the Open Handset Alliance founded by Google and the Software Freedom Conservancy won a default judgement against several GPL violators.

NPD reported that Android devices are now outselling BlackBerry in the US, AndroLib reported that the AnrdoidMarket surpassed 100,000 apps and Google confirmed that nearly 60% of all Android phones are now running version 2.1 of the OS. sonnes GmbH released GraphDB 1.1 for the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform, SugarCRM delivered its set of open source test tools, odt2braille brought Braille support to the OpenOffice.org office suite and the Drupal Commons 1.0 open source social networking tool for enterprises was announced.

The KDE project confirmed that the next major update to KDE, version 4.5, is delayed by one week, the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. board announced that their 2011 Desktop Summit would be held in Berlin and users can now support GNOME by purchasing music via Banshee. The Debian developers announced at DebConf10 this week that Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) has now entered the feature freeze part of the development cycle.

Open Source Releases

Security

During his presentation at the BlackHat Conference, a German GSM expert demonstrated a tool that can crack the A5/1 encryption used by mobile phones. A jailbreak for the latest iOS used by Apple's iPhone exposed vulnerabilities which could be exploited by criminals. Apple says it has a patch for these holes. A rootkit for Android mobile phones was demonstrated at the DEFCON hacking conference.

A number of routers are still vulnerable via their built-in web interface, the new Blind Elephant Web Application Fingerprinter tool was released and a number of anti-virus vendors still don't make full use of Windows exploit protection features. Pressure has started to mount on software vendors to fix vulnerabilities in their products within a reasonable amount of time, Cisco patched a number of its products to protect against several denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities and Microsoft has said that next weeks Patch Tuesday will be the largest on record.

Security Alerts

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.

(crve)

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