In association with heise online

15 January 2011, 11:59

The H Week - RHEL 5.6, IPv6, Firefox 4, Patch Tuesday & costly Chrome updates

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The H Week Logo In the past week, The H published a new edition of the Kernel Log, took a look at what's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 and detailed heise Online's transition to running in dual-stack mode with IPv4 and via IPv6. There was confusion over the Novell patent deal, the iOS port of the VLC Media Player was pulled from Apple's App Store due to licence conflicts and Mozilla confirmed that Firefox 4 would arrive in February. Microsoft released its first patches for 2011 and Google released an expensive update to its Chrome web browser.

Featured

This week, The H detailed heise Online's transition to running in dual-stack mode, in which pages can be accessed via both the conventional IPv4 and via IPv6, published a new edition of the Kernel Log and took an in-depth look at the latest features and changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6.

Open Source

There was confusion over the recently announced purchase of patents from Novell, the Hudson open source project announced that it may be re-named "Jenkins", following the lack of an agreement with Oracle, the TIOBE index listed Python as the programming language of 2010 and Ubuntu Developer Manager Scott James Remnant confirmed that he is leaving Canonical for Google.

The free iOS port of the popular VLC Media Player was pulled from Apple's App Store following complaints from VLC co-developer Rémi Denis-Courmont about conflicts between the GPL and the App Store terms. Later in the week, the VLC port's developer, Applidium, said that it continues to believe that App Store licensing conditions are compatible with GLPv2, under which VLC media player is released

Google confirmed that it would be removing support for the H.264 video codec from its Chrome web browser to "enable open innovation", while the Mozilla development team announced that it will integrate an IndexedDB API into the next major update to its browser, Firefox 4, which is scheduled to arrive next month.

The Linux Foundation published its 2011 event schedule, confirming that there would be a LinuxCon conference in Europe, Linuxhotel and Univention announced a Call for Papers and the availability of free floor space and presentation opportunities at this year's CeBIT trade show, and the OpenStreetMap project announced that it was accepting submissions for papers for it's 2011 State of the Map conference.

In other news, the GTVHacker dev team won a cash bounty for being the first to successfully root and enable third-party application support on a Google TV device even before Google, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Project confirmed that it's upcoming XO-1.75 laptop only requires two watts (2W) of power – less than half that of its predecessors.

Open Source Releases

Security

Also known as GeoHot, George Hotz released source code for a piece of software which can allegedly be used to sign homebrew programs so that they will run on Sony's Playstation 3. Later in the week, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) filed legal motions against the developer and his team members for by-passing the PlayStation 3's copy protection.

Security specialist Dillon Beresford confirmed that KingView, an application for visualising process data in industrial control systems which is reported to be in widespread use in China, contains a critical vulnerability that can be used to remotely compromise a system. Following press reports that an exploit was publicly available and after months of silence, the Chinese vendor Wellintech and Chinese CERT (CN-CERT) have now reacted.

Adobe announced plans to make it easier for browser makers to delete flash cookies from their browsers via a new API, Microsoft is expected to release the first service pack for Windows 7 in the near future, Google Apps customers can now sign outgoing messages, Thomas Roth confirmed that he plans to demonstrate how to crack WPA keys using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud at the forthcoming Black Hat conference, and it was reported that IPv6-capable smartphones can compromise users' privacy.

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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