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20 November 2010, 11:59

The H Week - Oracle & Java, Stuxnet, Adobe vulnerabilities

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The H Week Logo In the past week, The H looked at what's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, as well as openSUSE and its community. Oracle asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its position on Java, AMD joined the MeeGo project and Google's CEO confirmed that Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" is coming in the next few weeks. Further details about the Stuxnet worm and its probable purpose surfaced, McAfee said that malware is on the rise while spam is at a two year low and Apple re-posted its Mac OS X Server 10.6.5 update with fixes for a built-in mail server.

Featured

The H took an in-depth look at what's new in the latest version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and our latest edition in the Health Check series discussed openSUSE and its community.

Open Source

This week, Oracle asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its position on Java, high profile Java developer Bob Lee declined to support Oracle's current Java standardisation efforts, new draft Java 7 and 8 specifications and the new JDK 7 roadmap were released.

Processor manufacturer AMD announced at this year's MeeGo Conference in Dublin that it had joined the MeeGo open source project, Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed that Android 2.3, code named "Gingerbread" is coming "in the next few weeks" and Google Docs added support for document editing on Android and iOS devices.

Google manager Chris DiBona confirmed that in future Google will no longer be checking the names of new projects created on the Google Code Project Hosting service against those already on SourceForge, SourceForge apologised to the Audacity team for malicious ads that appeared on their download page and Black Duck Software acquired software tools and services provider SpikeSource.

The Mono developers announced that they plan to make Microsoft's F# programming language available under Linux and Mac OS X, the Indian government has agreed a policy on the use of open standards in e-governance and Mozilla re-examined its mission statement.

Open Source Releases

Security

A Command-and-Control server for the Koobface social networking botnet was discovered in the UK and was subsequently taken off-line. A new rootkit was discovered that is able to bypass kernel protection and driver signing in 64-bit Windows. Reports this week first revealed it was extremely likely that the Stuxnet worm payload was specifically designed to target the Iranian uranium enrichment program and then that the worm had a double payload that could also target power station turbines. In its latest report, McAfee said that malware is still on the rise and spam is at a two year low.

Adobe released Reader X with support for sandboxing on Windows, the VLC developers released an update for their open source media player to address a Windows-only security issue and the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) published a first version of the event schedule for the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3). Apple posted a new version of its Mac OS X Server 10.6.5 update, correcting a security vulnerability related to a built-in mail server, security expert Dan Kaminsky announced Phreebird, an easy-to-use tool set for creating digital signatures based on the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and Thomas Roth demonstrated the potential of cloud GPUs to perform fast, brute force attacks on SHA1 hash encrypted passwords.

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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