The H Roundup - AMD fires developers, Android turns 5, E17 alpha arrives

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item.

Top News

At LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona, it was revealed that several Linux kernel developers at AMD had been made redundant. In a Q&A, Linus Torvalds expressed his satisfaction with the improving relations between the mainline and Android kernel development efforts. Coincidentally, Android also turned 5 years old this week.

• AMD dismisses numerous open source developers
• Linus Torvalds: The Android situation is improving
• Android turns 5 years old

In security-related news, new malware was found to be spreading by pretending to be legitimate picture messages from Vodafone's MMS gateway and a researcher found a security issue that compromises the TOR anonymity client.

• Malware disguised as an MMS message
• Security issue discovered in TOR client

Back at LinuxCon Europe, the Enlightenment team announced the release of the first alpha of the E17 desktop environment. Elsewhere, the Ubuntu developers were busy planning their next release, and the Slax distribution managed to pack a KDE 4 installation into just 183MB with a new Slax 7.0 release candidate.

• Enlightenment releases first E17 alpha
• Ubuntu developers plan the road to Ubuntu 13.04
• Slax 7.0 packs a KDE 4 live OS into 183MB

Fans of the Raspberry Pi were treated to a new extension board for the mini-computer, a way to hook an Arduino microcontroller up to it and a Kickstarter campaign launched to create a gaming cabinet based on the device.

• Hardware Hacks: Pi Crust and a Raspberry Pi gaming cabinet
• Arduino gets piggyback from Raspberry Pi

Featured Articles

This week, Stefan Schurtz looked at using OWASP's CSRFTester to find cross-site request forgery problems in code, and Andrew Back harvested glowing bacteria from a squid that lives in a toilet in Manchester.

• Detecting CSRF vulnerabilities
• Community Live: DIYbio at Manchester Science Festival 2012
  

Open Source Releases

DragonFly BSD 3.2.1 was released with better database handling, an update to the Ubuntu Tweak utility added support for Ubuntu 12.10, there was a first preview of Ruby 2.0.0, and the ARM version of openSUSE 12.2 was declared stable. Chrome 23 closed several security holes and improved battery life for some users, and Microsoft open sourced its Reactive Extensions framework.

• Better database handling for DragonFly BSD 3.2.1
• Ubuntu Tweak update adds 12.10 Quantal Quetzal support
• Amazon resets AWS's PHP SDK
• Talend zooms in on big data with Open Studio 5.2
• Ruby 2.0.0 preview arrives
• openSUSE 12.2 for ARM released
• CloudStack makes first release from Apache incubator
• Chrome 23 closes holes, promises longer battery life
• Second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2012 dons "Moondrake" disguise
• Microsoft open sources Reactive Extensions
• New openSUSE 12.3 milestone ready for testing

Security Alerts

• Plone releases fixes for 24 vulnerabilities
• Security updates for Flash and Air
• QuickTime for Windows updated to close security holes

For everything The H has published in the last week, check out the last seven days of news. 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.

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