26 March 2011, 11:59

The H Week - Honeycomb source no-show, SSL meltdown, Firefox 4 finally

Android 3.0's source isn't being released, a Certificate Authority compromise shakes SSL trust, Firefox 4 finally gets released, Microsoft sues Android device makers and Linus dismisses claims of GPL violations in Android. All this and more in The H Week.

Featured

This week, The H's Christopher von Eitzen detailed what's new in the freshly released and long awaited Firefox 4.0, Thorsten Leemhuis looked at the start of Linux 2.6.39 development and Richard Hillesley discussed the two ethical forces of open source, pragmatism and idealism.

Open Source

Google announced there'd be no source code released for Android 3.0 "for the foreseeable future", the fuss over the legitimacy of Android's Bionic library headers was called "totally bogus" by Linus Torvalds, Microsoft sued Barnes & Noble over the Android based Nook and Amazon opened an Appstore for Android users in the US.

GNOME 3 is almost with us as it enters the release candidate phase, Debian's "Squeeze" got its first maintenance update, Red Hat didn't quite make it to being a billion dollar company but it did release a beta of RHEL 6.1 and the Linux Foundation brought together Smart TV companies to put together a MeeGo TV platform.

After a very long wait, Firefox 4 finally arrived and in 24 hours got over seven million downloads (and 20 million in 48 hours). Mozilla won't be waiting as long to release Firefox in future as it revealed plans for the new slipstreamed release process. Firefox 4 still had one release candidate to go though, for the version for Android and Maemo. Developers were kept happy with an updated Firebug for the new browser though.

Google updated all the Chrome versions (channels) this week, with 10 getting security patches, the first Chrome 11 beta debuting and the first appearance of the in development Chrome 12. Meanwhile Google's founder got himself a patent for the Google doodle, the company's fast compression system Snappy got open sourced and Page Speed appeared as an SDK and extension for Chrome.

Apple's Mail.app users can start encrypting their mail again as MacGPG gets Mail.app compatibility back, Mac OS X only browser Camino gets an update, Chameleon aims to get iPhone apps on the Mac desktop, MacRuby edges ever closer to final release, VLC gets a bit of Mac specific polish and Apple pull Samba from the next version of Mac OS X.

Open Source Releases

Security

When a certificate authority is compromised, trust goes into meltdown and that's exactly what happened this week as attackers compromised Comodo; browser makers were forced into releasing hurried updates to blacklist the rogue certificates and fingers were pointed. Meanwhile, the Stuxnet legacy rolls on as SCADA systems come under deeper scrutiny.

The wiki of the PHP developers was hacked, a password service used simple IP blocks to respond to hacker attacks, BlackBerry brought their Protect service to Europe and Apple closed more holes with an OS update.

Apache's HTTPClient had a critical bug in how it handled proxies, Adobe closed holes in Flash everywhere, Google closed Chrome holes and a DLL hijacking hole was found in Google's Picasa.

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.

(djwm)

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