The H Roundup - Secure Boot complaints, GNOME 3.8 and replacing Reader

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. This week, a look at migrating away from Google Reader, the release of GNOME 3.8, KDE's narrow escape from disaster, Red Hat's latest financials, a large DDoS attack, complaints against Secure Boot, DRM in HTML5, and a new GCC release.

Features

Fabian A. Scherschel looks at the available open source and proprietary alternatives to the soon-to-be-discontinued Google Reader and Thorsten Leemhuis begins his Linux 3.9 mini-series looking at the filesystems and storage features of the next version of the Linux kernel.

• Replacing Google Reader
• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.9 (part 1) – Filesystems and storage

Top News

The GNOME developers have released the latest version of their desktop for Linux and Unix systems, the KDE developers nearly lost all of their source code repositories, and Red Hat increased both its turnover and profits but still disappointed Wall Street.

• GNOME 3.8 brings polish and new Classic Mode
• KDE narrowly avoids disaster
• Red Hat increases turnover and profits

A large DNS attack was reportedly unleashed on the Spamhaus anti-spam service, while a developer discovered an ingenious way of hiding the actual target of a link.

• Large-scale DNS DDoS attack on Spamhaus
• The trick behind camouflaged links

A Spanish association of Linux users has filed a complaint with the EC against Microsoft for its mandating of Secure Boot, while a dispute has erupted over whether DRM functionality should be supported by HTML5.

• Secure Boot complaint filed against Microsoft
• DRM dispute around HTML5

The developers of Slackware Linux have decided to replace MySQL with MariaDB, GCC has completed its migration to C++ with its latest release, and The H's Open Recall covers a number of other happenings in the open source world this week.

• Slackware Linux switches to MariaDB
• GCC 4.8 completes migration to C++
• Open Recall: Android, Chrome OS, Ruby, and DOS on the Raspberry Pi

Open Source Releases

This week saw new releases from OpenELEC and Upstart, the first full release of Quicksilver, and new versions of Cairo-Dock, Google Chrome, GitLab, and GTK+.

• Media Centre Linux OpenELEC now on Raspberry Pi
• Upstart 1.8 reports file modifications
• Ten year beta ends with release of Quicksilver 1.0
• New features in Cairo-Dock 3.2
• Web-based spell checking comes to Chrome 26
• GitLab 5.0 is less dependent and scaling up
• GTK+ 3.8 brings Wayland support

Security Alerts

Users of NetBSD, MongoDB and BIND in particular should take a look at the following security alerts:

• Weak keys in NetBSD
• MongoDB: Exploit on the net, Metasploit in the making - Update
• Critical vulnerability in BIND 9 regular expression handling

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.

(fab)