The H Week - Tablets, Ubuntu 10.10, Chrome 6, & QuickTime vulnerabilities
In the past week, Canonical released a beta for Ubuntu 10.10, version 3.0 of Ruby on Rails arrived, CyanogenMod 6.0 brought Android 2.2 to older devices, Google released Chrome 6 and a number of companies released open source-based tablets aimed at competing with Apple's iPad. It was confirmed that Microsoft's tool for protecting against the DLL highjacking vulnerability caused several programs to stop working, India gave RIM two more months, IBM revised its X-Force security report and the source code for hacking PS3 game consoles arrived online.
Featured
This week, The H published a feature by heise Open Editor-in-chief Oliver Diedrich discussing InfoWorld's recent "Best Open Source Software Awards", also known as the Bossies, and why it shows the hype around commercial open source is over.
Open Source
Google kicked off the week by announcing that it will not be attending Oracle's JavaOne conference and version 3.0 of the Ruby on Rails web framework was released. Mongrel2 1.0, the language agnostic web server, was released by Mongrel creator Zed Shaw and Canonical released the first and only beta for version 10.10 of Ubuntu, code named "Maverick Meerkat".
- Google cancels JavaOne participation
- Rails 3: New release completes integration of Merb
- Language agnostic web server Mongrel2 1.0 released
- Canonical releases Ubuntu 10.10 Beta
A number of companies announced or confirmed details for their upcoming open source based internet tablets aimed at competing with Apple's iPad, including Android-based tablets from Samsung, Toshiba and Archos. Intel and the WeTab developers announced that their upcoming tablet would run the Linux-based MeeGo mobile operating system and CyanogenMod 6.0 was released for a variety of devices – allowing older phones like the original T-Mobile G1 to run the latest 2.2 "Froyo" release of Android. In other mobile computing news, HP/Palm released a developer preview of the next generation of its WebOS and Mozilla issued the first alpha for Fennec, the company's Firefox Mobile browser for Nokia's N900 and Android 2.0 or later devices.
- Samsung attacks the iPad
- Toshiba to release 10 inch tablet running Android 2.2
- WeTab is based on MeeGo
- Archos releases five budget Android tablets
- CyanogenMod 6.0 brings Android 2.2 to older devices
- Developer preview of WebOS 2.0
- Mozilla releases Fennec 2.0 Alpha 1 for Android & Nokia N900
Following news that its Wave real-time collaboration project would be shut down next year, Google announced its open source future as "Wave in a Box" and Mozilla renamed its Bespin cloud-based development environment to "Skywriter".
In other cloud news, VMware announced the launch of a new cloud platform for developing Java applications and partnered with Novell to launch SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware – free to customers that purchase a VMware vSphere license and subscription.
Indian vendor Knowledge Quest Infotech confirmed that it was working on a native ZFS port to Linux, Google developers announced that the open source browser upon which Chrome is based, Chromium, is getting a GPU graphics overhaul. Celebrating its second birthday, Google released version 6 of its Chrome web browser, adding several new features and fixing a number of security vulnerabilities, and GitHub launched version 2.0 of Pull Requests.
- ZFS as a Linux kernel module
- Chromium gets GPU acceleration
- Google Chrome turns version 6 on its second birthday
- GitHub launches "Pull Requests 2.0"
Open Source Releases
- XBMC 10.0 Beta 1 features new Add-ons system
- CEDET 1.0 adds IDE features to Emacs
- Lightspark 0.4.4 open source Flash player released
- Plex media centre adds support for hardware-accelerated video decoding
- Version 4 of Plone CMS released
- Univention Corporate Server 2.4 includes integrated virtualisation tool
- KDE SC 4.5.1 released with various bug fixes
- PostgreSQL 9.0's first release candidate arrives
- Wireshark 1.4.0 drops Windows 2000 support
- openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 arrives
- Songbird 1.8.0 adds support for more devices
Security
It was confirmed that Microsoft's tool aimed at protecting against the DLL highjacking vulnerability actually causes several programs to stop working and the company later released a 'fix-it' tool to address problems with some programs resulting in use of the tool. Towards the end of the week, Microsoft released a new version of its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) – version 2.0 – with a new graphical user interface and support for new protective functions.
- Microsoft tool for DLL vulnerability interferes with some applications
- Microsoft continues to workaround DLL vulnerability
- Microsoft hardening tool with graphical user interface
The Indian government has put its threat to block RIM's BlackBerry mobile email service for an additional two months, IBM updated its X-Force security report from last week following two vendors questioning the correctness of the company's evaluations and Secunia released a beta for version 2.0 of its Personal Software Inspector (PSI) application. Apple updated its iTunes media player to version 10.0, adding several new features and addressing 13 security vulnerabilities in WebKit, and the source code for hacking Sony's Playstation 3 (PS3) game console was released online.
- Two month breathing space for Indian BlackBerry users
- Unpatched security holes: IBM re-evaluates
- Secunia's PSI 2.0 beta tackles Windows update annoyances
- iTunes 10 addresses 13 security vulnerabilities
- PS3 hack source code published
Security Alerts
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(crve)