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02 July 2011, 11:59

The H Week - patent deals, controversies, losses and a trojan mouse

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The H Week Logo This week saw Microsoft, but not Google, make patent deals; Mozilla upset some corporates with its rapid releases; an open source JTAG test kit was released; open source user Gradwell won an award and Linus Torvalds explained his controversial views about userspace filesystems. LulzSec disbanded and alledged hacker Cleary was released on bail; Citibank admitted large losses from the URL tampering scam; a trojan mouse was demonstrated and Google started showing more header info to help spot phishing; a new scoring system for vulnerabilities was introduced.

Featured

In this week's feature articles, Simon Bisson looked at how Cisco works with OpenStack, Thorsten Leemhuis reported on the latest kernel news including the discovery of the cause of a power consumption problem, and Glyn Moody looked at how the second rise of HTML shows the power of open standards. There was also July's edition of The H's Community Calendar with events around the UK and Europe for the open source communities.

Open Source

Patents were topping the news this week, as Microsoft did not one or two, but three Android related patent deals and was one of the consortium members that got their hands on Nortel's patent portfolio (the one Google bid for, aiming to protect Android's ecosystem).

Mozilla found itself on the back foot as the rapid release and rapid end of life of Firefox releases upset enterprises; it has since offered an olive branch to the enterprise deployers and we await developments. Thunderbird 5.0 was also released by Mozilla, as was news of a plan to change how URLs are displayed and of the launch of a new hothouse for open web innovations.

An open source JTAG electronics testing kit was released, UK VOIP supplier and open source user Gradwell walked off with an industry award, Yahoo spun off Hortonworks for Hadoop development and Google's other distributed computing idea, Pregel, got an open source variant in the shape of a GoldenOrb.

InstantBird leapt to version 1.0 to bring open source IM to all platforms, Linus Torvalds caused controversy over his opinion of userspace filesystems, KDE users on Facebook found their pictures vanishing and the Linux Foundation selected the design for the Linux 20th aniversary T-shirt.


Open Source Releases

New releases for LibreOffice, Chrome 12, Pidgin, Debian Squeeze, Zarafa, Marathon, Linguist, PCLinuxOS, Joomla! and MathJax.

Development releases

Security

LulzSec appears to have called it a day and announced it disbanded, alleged hacker Ryan Cleary was released on bail, Citibank admitted its vulnerability to URL tampering had already cost $2.7M and Microsoft admitted it would comply to US requests for cloud data residing in Europe.

Researchers showed a trojan mouse as a novel new way of penetrating security, Google offered up more header information to help people spot phish, CWSS launched as a new way to score weaknesses in software and the top 25 list of mistakes, with CWSS scores, was published with SQL injection topping the chart.

Apple released an update to Mac OS X Java, Wordpress released a hole-closing security update and Avira's Antivir confused users with a new feature which came with an optional toolbar.

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)

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