The H Week - Red Hat controversy, Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3, Anonymous, HBGary CEO resigns
In the past week, The H took a look at the HBGary calamity and published a new edition of the Kernel Log. Controversy surrounded Red Hat's "obfuscated" source code release, Canonical released a third alpha for Ubuntu 11.04, and Mozilla issued Firefox 4 Beta 12, confirming that a release candidate should arrive next week. Google acquired German security firm Zynamics and removed malware apps from the Android Market, and WordPress was hit by its largest ever DDoS attack.
Featured
This week, Jürgen Schmidt took a look at how Anonymous made a laughing stock of HBGary and The H published another edition of the Kernel Log series looking at what's coming in the next release of the Linux kernel.
Open Source
There was controversy around Red Hat's "obfuscated" source code release for the Linux kernel; Novell released SUSE Manager, an advanced systems management solution aimed at enterprise Linux environments such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or its own SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, as well as announcing commercial support offerings for LibreOffice.
- Controversy surrounds Red Hat's "obfuscated" source code release
- SUSE Manager: system management for Linux
- Novell: LibreOffice now with commercial support
As expected, Canonical released the third and final alpha for Ubuntu 11.04, "Natty Narwhal", a snapshot of the Wayland display server arrived in the Ubuntu Universe repository, Linux Mint Founder Clement Lefebvre announced that the next major release of his Ubuntu based distribution, Linux Mint 11, would not use Canonical's Unity desktop in favour of GNOME 3, and the KDE developers confirmed that they will continue using Qt.
- Canonical releases Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3
- Wayland snapshot available for Ubuntu 11.04
- Linux Mint 11 "Katya" to use GNOME 3
- KDE developers are sticking to Qt
The Mozilla Project plans to issue a release candidate for version 4.0 of its Firefox web browser next week; Microsoft confirmed that more than one million blogs previously hosted on its Live Spaces blogging service have been moved to WordPress; and Oracle confirmed that it has completed the migration of Java to java.net.
- Firefox 4 RC to ship next week
- WordPress replaces more than a million Microsoft Live Spaces blogs
- Oracle: Java migration to java.net complete
The Linux Foundation announced that the Yocto Project, a Foundation workgroup announced in October 2010, is joining forces with the OpenEmbedded community; Tasktop Technologies and Microsoft released a presented a public beta of the Tasktop plug-in for Visual Studio at CeBIT; and the Khronos Group released version 1.0 of the WebGL specification at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
- Yocto and OpenEmbedded get together
- Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server connected to the rest of the ALM world
- GDC: 3D in your browser – WebGL 1.0 is finished
Open Source Releases
- Second service release of Eclipse Helios issued
- MacRuby 0.9 released
- PC-BSD 8.2 "Hubble Edition" released
- X.org completes X Server 1.10
- Linux Mint 10 KDE released
- GlassFish 3.1 offers cluster support
- 19 vulnerabilities - Chrome 9 update proves expensive for Google
- FreeNAS 8.0 approaches with RC2
- Very Secure FTP Daemon - now even safer
- Mozilla issues Firefox & Thunderbird security updates
- CollabNet launches TeamForge Project
- Wireshark updates close critical vulnerabilities
- Upstart 1.0 released
- JasperSoft integrates with R statistics
- opentaps 1.5: Open Source ERP + CRM in the cloud
- CentOS 4.9 released
- Version 1.2 of Piwik web analysis software brings new features
- RHEL-based Scientific Linux 6.0 released
- Ruby framework Sinatra 1.2 arrives
- Fragments for older versions of Android
Development Releases
- Mozilla releases Firefox 4 Beta 12 for testing
- openSUSE 11.4 RC2 arrives
- Mandriva Linux 2011 Alpha 2 released for testing
- Nokia releases Qt SDK 1.1 Beta
- Canonical releases Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3
Security
Apple provided a number of security experts with a pre-release version of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and asked for feedback as Sophos reported on a new trojan that targets Mac users. In the wake of the Anonymous attacks, HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr resigned and Intel's acquisition of McAfee has been completed.
- Security experts take a close look at Lion
- Trojan targets Mac OS X
- Aaron Barr, HBGary Federal CEO, resigns
- Intel's acquisition of McAfee now complete
Google acquired Zynamics, a German security firm, this week and also pulled more than 50 malicious applications from the Android Market. For users that lose their Android phones, Plan B launched to help them locate it by installing phone tracking software remotely after it has disappeared.
- Google acquires German security firm Zynamics
- Android malware on the rise, 21 apps pulled from Android Market
- Android: in emergencies, refer to Plan B
The WordPress blogging service was hit by a massive distributed denial of service attack this week, the largest it has ever experienced; the infrastructure of the members-only security mailing list "Vendor-Sec" for open source vendors was severely damaged; and US actor and prominent Twitter user Ashton Kutcher had his Twitter account broken into.
- WordPress hit by massive DDoS attack
- Crackers destroy security mailing list for Linux distributors
- Ashton Kutcher's Twitter account hacked
Microsoft announced that it plans to release three updates to close four holes in its products; Apple released iTunes 10.2 which addressed numerous security bugs and updates to the Very Secure FTP Daemon have made it even safer.
- Microsoft Patch Tuesday: three updates planned
- iTunes 10.2 addresses multiple security vulnerabilities
- Very Secure FTP Daemon - now even safer
Security Alerts
- Security update for Foxit Reader
- 19 vulnerabilities - Chrome 9 update proves expensive for Google
- Mozilla issues Firefox & Thunderbird security updates
- Wireshark updates close critical vulnerabilities
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)