The Final H Roundup

As The H closes its doors, we decided to have a look at some of the most popular articles and news items from the four and a half years since The H came into existence. The range is wide, from security alerts and skilled cracking, to interviews with open source luminaries and historical views of projects, from the latest news from the open source front to the potential future opened up by many projects. Here, for your final delectation, are the finest ten stories and features from The H.

Remember the days before PRISM and the NSA scandals? The H does because in May 2013 we were warning people that, despite previous assurances that Skype calls and connections could not be eavesdropped on, Microsoft was already reading your Skype chat traffic and following your URLs, albeit some hours later.

• Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write

Democracy is always under threat and it takes good researchers to work out where the flaws in modern voting systems are. In March 2012, University of Michigan researchers took control of a pilot e-voting system within 48 hours of it going live.

• US e-voting system cracked in less than 48 hours

He's one of the best known names in open source and in November 2012 Linus Torvalds sat down with regular The H columnist Glyn Moody to talk about how his work had changed since 1996, the last time Moody interviewed him.

• Interview: Linus Torvalds - I don't read code any more

Sometimes, it's the smallest news items that get people reading. March 2012's news that Google was going to having HTTPS on as a default was just one of those stories. In ironic hindsight, it wasn't just the HTTP connections that people should have been worrying about.

• Google is globally switching its search to HTTPS by default

Sometimes the news is also late arriving. Like the discovery in January 2010 of a Windows hole which had stayed hidden since 1993. Although acknowledged and fixed in good time it did serve as a useful reminder that bugs and holes can be subtle and long-lived.

• Windows hole discovered after 17 years - Update

Richard Hillesley was a regular contributor to The H and his detailed histories of elements of free and open source software were always popular. But none more so than when he delved into the history of GNU Hurd in June 2010 and documented how the operating system that could have been, still wasn't.

• GNU HURD - Altered visions and lost promise

Privacy is always important, no matter if it's the NSA or the neighbours listening in. Back in May 2012 it was likely to have been the neighbours as it was discovered that the WhatsApp's chat app now had a sniffer to extract those instant messages and make them into instant memories.

• Sniffer tool displays other people's WhatsApp messages

Fabian A. Scherschel joined The H in 2011 and set about creating popular articles. Take his June 2012 feature on the alternatives to Canonical's Unity desktop on Ubuntu which is still well read - though that may be down to a desire for alternatives to Canonical's Unity desktop.

• Unity alternatives - the many desktops of Ubuntu

Open source hardware is one of the new growth areas of open source, and The H was lucky to get Andrew Back, founder of the Open Source Hardware User Group, to examine various aspects of it. In February 2012, he looked at five different potentially world-changing projects.

• Five open source hardware projects that could change the world

And in the last days of The H, Thorsten Leemhuis, who produced the wonderfully detailed Kernel Logs that were referred to by Torvalds himself when announcing Linux 3.10, broke the news that Linux 3.11 was dubbed Linux for Workgroups:

• "Linux for Workgroups": Linux 3.11's feature set now confirmed

Thanks for reading The H.

Dj Walker-Morgan and the rest of The H team.