The H Week - PHP turns 15, Safari gains Readabilty and SCO trials end

This week PHP turned 15, Apple's Safari 5 incorporated Arc90 Labs open sourced Readability technology and the SCO vs. Linux litigation does seem, finally to have come to an end. Email addresses for thousands of iPad owners were lifted from AT&T, Adobe released a new version of Flash Player closing over 30 security holes and Microsoft took offence over Tavis Ormandy publicising a security hole in its Help and Support Center.

Featured

This week, The H's editor in chief suggested open source developers should thank Apple for providing better competition and Glyn Moody explained why GNU/Linux is unmatched and unmatchable.

• Why open source developers should thank Apple
• Why GNU/Linux is unmatched – and unmatchable

Open Source

The week started with news that Google had changed the WebM / VP8 licence to resolve issues about GPL compatibility and patents and closed with the news that the long-running SCO vs Linux legal battle was finally over with SCO losing. A survey of Eclipse developers showed Linux making advances on developer desktops, Apple's Safari 5 browser's new "reader" feature was found to be based on open source, PHP celebrated it's fifteenth birthday and Ingres promised to open source its VectorWise database by the end of the year. Decisions were made on what will go into GNOME 3.0, Ubuntu announced plans to decommission the SPARC and IA64 ports of its Linux distribution, a native port of ZFS for Linux emerged and KDE launched a new fundraising campaign.

• WebM project changes to standard open source licence
• Eclipse Community Survey shows good growth for Linux
• ZFS for the Linux kernel
• Apple's Safari 5 Reader incorporates open source tool
• 15 years of PHP
• Ingres VectorWise goes GA, open source by end of year
• New module decisions for GNOME 3.0
• KDE launches fundraising campaign at LinuxTag
• SCO vs. Linux – case closed!
• Ubuntu to decommission SPARC port, IA64 port in jeopardy

Open Source Releases

• Songbird 1.7.2 adds support for Windows 7
• Sabayon Linux 5.3 adds new installer
• WordPress 3.0 nearly complete
• Python 2.7 release candidate available
• digiKam 1.3.0 improves database support
• HSQLDB / HyperSQL 2.0 released
• Second beta of KDE SC 4.5
• Next3: Ext3 with snapshots
• OpenSuse Build Service 1.8 and 2.0 completed

Security

AT&T leaked 114,000 email addresses of iPad owners through a web site, quarrels over disclosure marked the reporting of a vulnerability in Windows Help and a zero-day exploit emerged for Adobe's Flash Player, Reader and Acrobat was fixed, for Flash at least, with the release of Flash Player 10.1. In other news, Microsoft held their monthly patch Tuesday and updated Office 2004 and 2008 on Mac and OpenOffice 3.2.1 closed two security holes. We also looked at the new generation of SMS based card skimmers and the scams that go with them and a new tool for attacking websites which use encrypted session data.

• AT&T lets 114,000 email addresses of iPad owners leak out
• Zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player, Reader and Acrobat
• Exploit for new Flash vulnerability spreading fast
• Adobe to fix critical vulnerability in Flash this Thursday
• Adobe releases final version of Flash Player 10.1
• Microsoft's June Patch Tuesday
• Microsoft releases Autoruns 10
• Microsoft releases security updates for Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac
• Windows Help used as attack surface
• Quarrels about new Windows Vulnerability
• OpenOffice 3.2.1 closes two vulnerabilities
• Skimming from the sofa
• Tool for cracking encrypted session data

Security Alerts

• Zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player, Reader and Acrobat
• Apple's Safari updates address 48 security vulnerabilities
• Google pays $2,000 for report of a vulnerability in Chrome

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(trk)