The H Week - Microsoft holes and the Oracle/Sun deal closes

This week's news on The H was dominated by repercussions of the targeted attacks on US companies and reports on the holes in Microsoft software that the attackers exploited. Final efforts were made by the 'free MySQL' campaign as the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems approached its conclusion.

Features

The H published two features this week; a Health Check on Moonlight, the open source version of Microsoft's Silverlight and a step-by-step guide for the small web site operator to obtaining and installing free SSL certificates.

• Health Check: Moonlight
• SSL for free

Security

Security news this week has been all about the recent attacks on US companies and the holes in Microsoft software that, combined with a general laxity in upgrading to up-to-date and more secure software versions, allowed the attackers to penetrate these companies systems. The fall out included the almost unprecedented step of national governments issuing public warnings against using Microsoft Internet Explorer and, as a result, a spike in downloads of Firefox and other alternative browsers.

Microsoft vulnerabilities, as well as causing governmental concern also made the news this week with perhaps one of the oldest software flaws; A hole with origins going back 17 years has been found in all 32bit versions of Windows. including Windows 7.

• Warning over using Internet Explorer from German Government as exploit goes public
• US to protest against Chinese hacker attacks
• German government IE warning leads to spike in Firefox downloads
• Tor Project servers hacked

Security Alerts

• Another patch for MIT Kerberos
• Apple releases Security Update for Mac OS X
• Windows hole discovered after 17 years - Update
• Adobe fixes critical holes in Shockwave
• Mozilla addresses critical holes with Thunderbird 3.0.1
• The emergency patch for Internet Explorer

Open Source

As expected, this week saw the European Commission giving the go ahead to the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems and ignoring the pleas of Monty Widenius and others for MySQL to be isolated from the deal. Widenius has appealed to the Russian and Chinese competition authorities, but this seems unlikely to affect the acquisition. Canonical and IBM announced their cooperation on offering Ubuntu plus Lotus components and a support service as a viable alternative to Windows 7 for companies considering their future software needs. The H published another edition of our Linux Kernel Log, this time dealing with the longer term maintenance of the various stable series of Linux kernels.

Some of the most significant releases this week are Firefox related. The Firebug developers actually managed to release Firebug 1.5.0 a little ahead of the Mozilla release of Firefox 3.6.

• MySQL founder asks China, Russia to stop Oracle
• Canonical offering support for Lotus Symphony on Ubuntu
• Google patents Map/Reduce
• European Commission approves Oracle's acquisition of Sun
• Kernel Log: Long-term maintenance for 2.6.32, util-linux-ng extended

Open Source Releases

• Mozilla releases Firefox 3.6 RC2
• Puredyne 9.10 released
• Disney releases Ptex texture mapper as open source
• Firebug 1.5.0 released - ready for Firefox 3.6
• Version 5.20 of the Nmap network scanner arrives
• Mozilla officially releases Firefox 3.6
• Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris arrives (Wine included)
• Perl 6 development: Parrot 2.0.0 released

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)