The H Week - browser sandboxing, disaffection with Oracle & anti-virus update problems
A bounty was posted for the first hack on Google TV and Google upped the browser security ante by adding a sandboxed PDF reader and Flash player. Microsoft migrated 0.5 million blogs to WordPress and took a challenge to a significant patent case ruling to the Supreme Court. Further disaffection was expressed in the wake of the Oracle takeover of Sun. More holes were found in Palm's WebOS and once again faulty anti-virus updates caused problems for a large number of users.
Featured
In the wake of the announcement that Novell had been sold Glyn Moody examined the implications. The H published our Community Calendar for December and the Kernel Log series on the 2.6.37 Linux Kernel kicked off with Part 1 on graphics.
- What's new about the Novell deal?
- The H Community Calendar - December 2010
- Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.37 (Part 1) - Graphics
Open Source
Howard Harte posted a bounty for the first person to add third-party application support to a Google TV device before Google.
Microsoft reported the migration of over half a million Live Spaces blogs to the WordPress platform and took a challenge to a patents case ruling to the Supreme Court that, if successful, could benefit the future of open source.
- 500,000+ Windows Live Spaces blogs migrated to WordPress
- Microsoft patent challenge heads to Supreme Court
Fallout from the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems continued to settle as the Hudson project, unhappy with Oracle's hosting infrastructure changes decided to look for a new home and a French developer, impatient with the time it was taking for Apple to move its Java code to Oracle's OpenJDK project, released his own OpenJDK for Mac OS X.
In the Linux arena, operating system vendor Red Hat strengthened its portfolio by acquiring cloud specialists Makara, prominent kernel developer Greg Koah-Hartman proposed it was time to stop talking about it and actually produce a rolling release version of openSUSE and the KDE project released update 4.5.4 of its Linux and Unix desktop manager.
- Red Hat acquires cloud specialist Makara
- openSUSE: Rolling release project Tumbleweed proposed
- KDE SC 4.5.4 update released
Open Source Releases
- PyPy 1.4 brings speed improvements
- Linux tools support iOS 4.2.1
- Wine 1.3.8 released
- Puppy Linux founder releases Quirky 1.4
- Flock 3.5 social web browser arrives
- Free Linux client released for Ryzom MMORPG game
- Ubuntu One Windows client in beta
- RabbitMQ 2.2.0 released
- Magnolia 4.4 CMS with new team features
- Chrome to run Flash Player in a sandbox
- Oracle releases VM VirtualBox update 3.2.12
- Canonical releases Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1
- openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 4 arrives
- Google releases Chrome 8.0 stable
- Push technology for Google's App Engine
Security
Mobile operating systems continued to come under scrutiny and more holes were found in Palm's WebOS.
The GNU project's Savannah forge was taken off line after a successful SQL injection attack, Dmitry Sklyarov, famous for his prosecution under the DMCA, cracked Canon's digital image verification system and it was discovered that the source code for the ProFTPD FTP server software had been modified to include a hidden back door.
- Savannah software forge compromised
- Russians on the moon? Canon's image verification system cracked
- Back door in ProFTPD FTP server
Google released a new version of its Chrome browser into the stable channel which included a built-in, sandboxed, PDF viewer, having already announced it has a developer channel version waiting in the wings which also includes a sandbox for the Adobe Flash plug-in.
Anti-virus products are becoming notorious for faulty updates and this week Kaspersky released a second attempt at a critical fix as the first one had caused high loading on some systems and an AVG update rendered computers running the 64bit version of Windows 7 unusable.
Security Alerts
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(trk)