The H Week - Patents, Androids and Password Punishments
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.
- Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.36 (Part 3) - Architecture & Infrastructure
- Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.36 (Part 4) - Drivers
- Is Microsoft 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.
- Microsoft sues Motorola over Android smartphones
- Oracle vs. Android: Google denies patent infringement allegations and insists on open source
- Red Hat settles 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.
- Google reports >30% of Android devices now running 2.2
- Adobe AIR for Android now available
- Marvell gives OLPC $5.6 million for development of next gen laptop
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.
- Google open sources Liquid Galaxy environment for Google Earth
- Google releases first Chrome 7 beta
- Google publishes additional Google TV details
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.
- Firefox 4 to add Bing and remove Creative Commons search
- Mozilla releases Firefox 4 Beta 1 for Android and Maemo
- Mozilla updates Firefox Sync
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.
- Oracle wishes LibreOffice the best, but won't directly cooperate
- Document Foundation's first week "shows strong support"
- ZFS gains data encryption
- NetBeans 6.10 becomes 7.0 to sync with JDK
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.
- Black Duck Software buys Ohloh.net open source software directory
- Nokia's MeeGo VP leaves
- Bradley Kuhn becomes fulltime Executive Director of SFC
- Smeegol 1.0 arrives to make Meego more openSUSEy
- Flaw in libc implementation threatens FTP servers
- Canonical prepares for a Sunday Ubuntu
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.
- Mono 2.8 released
- LLVM 2.8 compiler infrastructure released
- Firebird 2.5 has improved user administration
- Alfresco Community 3.4 arrives
- MacRuby 0.7 released
- KDE SC 4.5.2 service update released
- GIMP 2.6.11 fixes printing bug
- Wine 1.3.4 adds ARM architecture support
- MySQL derivative MariaDB 5.2 gamma released
- openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 2 released
- Open source Windows driver for NFSv4.1 released
- NuPack: Open source package manager for .NET
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.
- Four months jail for refusing to disclose password
- Study: Many free iPhone apps pass device ID to the app vendor
- Microsoft planning record Patch Tuesday
- Microsoft Security Essentials - 1 year on
- IDA Pro 6.0 disassembler released
- Security updates for PostgreSQL
- Security updates for Foxit products
- MySQL update addresses DoS vulnerability
- Hole in TYPO3: When equal isn't identical
Security Alerts
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(djwm)