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09 October 2010, 12:00

The H Week - Patents, Androids and Password Punishments

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Among the weeks news and articles from The H: Microsoft and Motorola have come to blows over patents related to Android, four months in jail for a man who refused to disclose a password, Linux 2.6.36 approaches and is Microsoft "running out of steam?"

Featured

As the release of the Linux Kernel 2.6.36 approaches, the Kernel Log has looked at the architecture, infrastructure and drivers of the forthcoming update. And as Microsoft took Motorola to court for patent infringement, Glyn Moody asked if Microsoft was running out of steam.

Open Source

Microsoft sued Motorola over Android smartphones, Google denied any patent infringement in the case brought by Oracle and Red Hat quietly settled a patent case with Software Tree.

Meanwhile, Google reported that more than thirty per cent of Android phones were running the latest version of the mobile operating system, Adobe shipped its proprietary AIR platform for Android and Marvell funded the development of OLPC's next gen laptop / tablet.

In other Google related news, the company open sourced the software and mechanical design of its big screen surround system for viewing Google Earth, released the first beta of Chrome 7 and offered more details on the Android based Google TV.

Mozilla announced that it would be adding Bing search to Firefox 4, but removing the Creative Commons search option. It also released a beta of Firefox 4 for Mobile, the latest name for what has, in the past been called Fennec and Firefox for Mobile and it released an update to its syncing technology.

Oracle wished LibreOffice the best, but said it would not be cooperating directly with the Document Foundation while the Foundation itself announced it had a good first week in starting development of its OpenOffice fork. In other announcements Oracle said it was adding encryption to ZFS and changed the version number of the next NetBeans to synchronise it with the next Java release in 2011.

Black Duck took Ohloh.net off Geeknet's hands to merge it with its other open source directories and search technology, the man in charge of MeeGo devices at Nokia moved on, openSUSE volunteers created a openSUSE/MeeGo blend called Smeegol, FTP servers were on alert as a bug in libc implementations made them vulnerable to a denial of service attack and Canonical prepared for he Sunday release of Ubuntu 10.10.


Open Source Releases

Releases for Mono, LLVM, Firebird, Alfresco and MacRuby, updates for KDE, GIMP and Wine, development releases for MariaDB and openSUSE 11.4 and débuts for an open source Windows NFS4.1 driver and NuPack, a .NET package manager.

Security

A man went to jail for four months after refusing to disclose a password, iPhone apps were found to be passing device IDs to application vendors, Microsoft Security Essentials celebrated its one year birthday and Microsoft is planning a record Patch Tuesday for next week. Adobe patched 23 holes in Reader and Acrobat, Version 6.0 of the IDA Pro disassembler was released, security updates for the PostgreSQL and MySQL databases and Foxit's PDF readers were published, and another hole was found in TYPO3.


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.

(djwm)

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