28 December 2012, 12:14

The H Roundup 2012 - May to August

The H Roundup 2012 As the end of the year approaches, TheÂ H's weekly roundup expands its scope and looks back, month by month at 2012, sharing the most read stories and features for each of those months. In the first part we looked at January to April. In this part, we head into the summer covering May to August...

May

A brief breaking of Google's reCAPTCHA system opened May for TheÂ H, while Chrome passed IE in one of the measurements of browser market share and a botnet operator told all on Reddit. There were also new arrivals with Apache's OpenOffice project shipping version 3.4.0, GIMP 2.8 and its new single window mode and a refresh of the venerable Perl 5.

As kernel hackers were enjoined to help enforce the GPL, Richard Hillesley looked at how they could help. Dj Walker-Morgan sat down with the creator of Scala, Martin Odersky and talked languages while Thorsten Leemhuis looked at the new additions in the just released Fedora 17.

June

Password leaks were the theme for June as multiple companies were leaking passwords that were insufficiently protected and promptly being cracked. TheÂ H looked forward to the improvements coming in Linux 3.5 and Google rolled out a plan to let companies port new versions of Android quicker and to help ease update pains. Firefox's latest security enhancements were causing problems with Flash while the Mozilla desgners previewed how the next generation of their browser would look.

June's feature articles included Fabian Scherschel's look at how to get a range of desktops installed on Ubuntu and Chris von Eitzen's interview with the makers of FlightGear.

July

As Google closed an office in July, one of the projects it was working on, was released as open source. The month wasn't too friendly to Linux systems as many Linux servers around the world tripped up on its leap second and in turn burnt through a lot more power. Ubuntu's 12.10 alpha 3 showed the world new unified user menus and a PC from Aldi sporting UEFI Secure Boot was spotted, one of the first to be seen in the retail channel.

Linux 3.5 landed and everyone wanted to know what was in it; Thorsten Leemhuis provided the details in his feature article. Andrew Back looked into how a free as in freedom phone could be built and Glyn Moody expressed his concerns that an overly successful Android could create problems for Free Software.

August

As the rustling of autumn approached, so did the warnings from Google as patches for Reader on Windows gave away enough information to enable attacks on Reader on other platforms; there were also warnings about many holes in Java which could let malware in. In what would become a motif for the rest of the year, a sniffer tool allowed WhatApp messages to be intercepted. Debian, meanwhile, switched to using Xfce for live CDs and Microsoft said don't use PPTP and MS-CHAP, as by default these protocols had weak keys.

The Java warnings led to a feature article on TheÂ H which examined how the attacks worked by exploiting type confusion. Richard Hillesley looked at the current state of GNOME and moves to rebuild the desktop's and developers' reputations after the battering they had received after GNOME 3's release.

(djwm)

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