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21 May 2011, 11:59

The H Week - Linux 2.6.39 arrives, RHEL 6.1, Android holes, Mac scareware

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The H Week In the past week, The H spoke with Pamela "PJ" Jones as she steps down from running the Groklaw site and published a detailed look at what's new in the latest release of the Linux kernel. Red Hat published version 6.1 of its enterprise Linux as Fedora 15 went gold, Perl was updated to 5.14 and MeeGo 1.2 arrived. Sony began to bring its beleaguered PlayStation Network back online, there were reports of Android malware, and Macs made the news for all of the wrong reasons: scareware in the form of fake AV programs.

Featured

This week, The H featured an interview with Pamela "PJ" Jones as she steps down from running the Groklaw site and Thorsten Leemhuis detailed what was new in the latest release of the Linux kernel.

Open Source

Linux 2.6.39 was released after only 65 days in development, Yahoo won a patent battle, Europe was found to lead in Linux desktop adoption, and Fabrice Bellard showed how you could run Linux in a browser on a PC emulator written in JavaScript.

Red Hat released version 6.1 of its enterprise Linux, was one of the founding members of the Open Virtualization Alliance and got together with SAP to unify trouble tickets for SAP on RHEL. Meanwhile, Microsoft said its virtualisation would support Red Hat clone CentOS, Fedora 15 was completed ready for release next week and the new boss of SUSE said openSUSE was definitely on his mind.

Perl received an update to version 5.14, MeeGo's six monthly update brought it to version 1.2, Ubuntu developers planned for October's release of Ubuntu 11.10 and Miguel de Icaza laid out his plans for Xamarin, his Mono-centric startup.

The Open Source Initiative began the process of reformation and widening its membership, OpenLogic said GPL is popular with developers but enterprise wants Apache code, Oracle set out plans to shake up the Java Community Process and made its JRockit JVM free of charge.

Pamela Jones announced who would be taking over the Groklaw site, the LibreOffice developers explained their version numbering, Google counted the participants in their summer of code, the UK government was allegedly heading for a dispute with standards organisations and Dell released an updated build of Chromium OS for its Mini 10v netbook.

Open Source Releases

New releases arrived for Groovy-Eclipse integration, GNU's VOIP server, the Clonezilla disk duplicator, VirtualBox, the Transmission BitTorrent client, the GRUB booter, MapServer and WordPress for iOS.

Development releases

Security

Sony began to bring its beleaguered PlayStation Network back online, but ran into more trouble with passwords and isn't allowed to restart in Japan yet because of the authorities' concerns over its security.

Android malware is already becoming commonplace. A hole found this week found that over 90% of Android devices were transferring their login tokens to Google unencrypted; Google moved to force the phones to use HTTPS as they can't get an update to Android 2.3.4 out to most of them.

The "three-strikes" agency for the French copyright enforcers suffered a data leak, Mozilla revealed plans to bring a rapid end of life to Firefox 3.5 and researchers cancelled a talk on SCADA vulnerabilities after the vendor found it was still vulnerable to attack.

Microsoft published its breakdown on the state of online security, country by country, and released an updated version of its EMET tool which can help secure applications. Mac scareware made the headlines and Microsoft researchers pointed out the extreme similarity it had to some specific Windows scareware.

Security Alerts

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.

(crve)

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