The H Roundup - Open source laptops, Samsung holes and GPL defence

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

This week, readers were interested to hear about an all open source, and remarkably powerful laptop being developed by the man who led the creation of the Chumby, Wikipedians finally got their first glimpse of the new VisualEditor for wiki entries and the alternative build of Android for mobile devices, CyanogenMod, started rolling out version 10.1 to selected devices.

• Chumby developer building open source laptop
• VisualEditor launched in Wikipedia
• CyanogenMod 10.1 rolls out to some devices

Life wasn't so simple for another group of Android devices, those powered by the Exynos 4 SoC, when it was found Samsung had added a somewhat egregious hole to the Android operating system. Meanwhile Google said it was shutting down ways to access its calendar sync service and Microsoft closed a "forced activation" hole in Windows 8.

• Exynos 4 critical security hole affects many Galaxy devices
• Google discontinues calendar sync services
• Microsoft closes forced activation flaw in Windows 8

Virtually updates for all versions of Virtualbox were published by Oracle, HTML5 became a candidate recommendation and the HTML enhancement work moved to HTML5.1, the alternative display stack Wayland set out plans for the next version of the system and Canonical added photo display functionailty to its Ubuntu One service.

• VirtualBox 4.2.6 leads Oracle virtualisation update
• HTML5 is done - HTML 5.1 next on standards agenda
• Wayland sets waypoint for next release
• Canonical adds photo functions to Ubuntu One

Featured Articles

Two interviews featured on The H this week as we talked to Bradley Kuhn about how to defend the GPL and what tools and techniques he'd learnt and spoke to Eben Upton, executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, about the original, core educational goals of the foundation and how the hardware fits in with that.

• Defence of the GPL realm
• Eben Upton: An educational life of Pi

Open Source Releases

This week saw new versions of PulseAudio, TomEE, Qt and open source financials system OpenGamma. ROSA released their new Linux distribution, Desktop.Fresh and Zurmo set out to enchant CRM users.

• PulseAudio 3.0 now better with mobile and wireless
• TomEE 1.5.1 more than just a maintenance update
• Zurmo sets out to enchant the open source CRM space
• Reorganised: Qt 5.0 is now ready
• OpenGamma updates its open source financial analytics platform
• ROSA releases Desktop.Fresh 2012

Development wise, StatusNet is changing and will be replaced in good time by a system driven by the up and coming pump.io.

• StatusNet transforms into Node.js-driven pump.io

Security Alerts

Antique Flash within Shockwave made the player vulnerable and Microsoft fixed a broken patch which had been making fonts vanish.

• Shockwave uses vulnerable Flash
• Microsoft brings back the fonts

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.

(djwm)