The H Week - Bilski fizzles, Android marches on, and have you HURD?

In the week just past, The H has covered the fizzling of the Bilski patent case, the advances of Android 2.2, the completing of the Moblin/Maemo merge in MeeGo, the easy unlockability of another USB stick and looked back on the history of GNU HURD.

Featured

This week, The H featured Glyn Moody asking if Oracle has been a disaster for Sun's open source projects and Richard Hillesley looking at the history of GNU HURD. The H also published its community calendar for July.

• Has Oracle been a disaster for Sun's open source?
• GNU HURD - Altered visions and lost promise
• The H Community Calendar - July 2010

Open Source

The much awaited Bilski ruling from the US Supreme Court turned out to be a damp squib, the Moblin/Maemo merger is completed as Meego released a preview of Meego for Handsets, and Google updated Nexus One smartphones to the latest Android OS which is also on the way for Intel Atom-based netbooks. Oracle joined the SQLite Consortium and Cisco joined the tablet business with Android and Ubuntu-based devices. Apache's Hadoop saw announcements setting its course for the enterprise, GitHub came up with a better way of organising groups of repositories and Firefox become IBM's new default browser. There were also updates for Oracle's VM VirtualBox, Tomcat 7, Debian's Lenny, KDE 4.4, K3B, SysLinux and GIMP, and betas or release candidates for KDE 4.5, openSUSE 11.3, RHEL6 and Nexenta Core.

• US Supreme Court rejects Bilski patent but nothing else
• MeeGo Handset experience previewed, Moblin/Maemo merger complete
• Google update Nexus One to Android 2.2 "Froyo"
• Android 2.2 for Atom netbooks this summer
• New Fedora Project Leader appointed
• Cisco announces Android and Ubuntu-based tablets
• GitHub introduces Organizations group-owned repositories
• Apache Hadoop goes Enterprise
• Oracle join SQLite Consortium
• Firefox to become IBM's new default browser

Open Source Releases

• Oracle releases VM VirtualBox 3.2.6
• Debian 5.0 "Lenny" update released
• IBM releases open source version of TranslationManager/2
• KDE SC 4.5 RC1 arrives
• Syslinux 4.00: boot loader for Ext4, Btrfs and large data carriers
• KDE SC 4.4.5 monthly bug fix update arrives
• Talend announce Apache Hadoop support
• Second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 released
• Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 RC2 arrives
• GIMP 2.7.1 with new user interface
• Canonical releases Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2
• Mozilla releases Firefox 1.1 for Nokia N900
• K3b 2.0 burner software with Blu-ray support arrives
• Tomcat 7 beta released
• Rhomobile 2.0 now available for developing platform-independent phone apps
• Final openSUSE 11.3 release candidate arrives

Security

Norton triggered false alarms after Firefox updated, a survey found that passwords were a constant in life, Google integrated a safe PDF viewer into Chrome and Corsair's Padlock 2 secure USB drive was found to be easily unlockable. Unerasable SD cards appeared from SanDisk, trojan attacks were found to mostly come from legitimate websites, Captcha's got flashier, geolocation services were found to be a little too public with their information and phishers started using the good name of Wikipedia to push their polluted links. Finally, alerts went up for a critical hole in a common PNG processing library and Adobe updated Reader to close 17 critical holes.

• Norton produces false alarm after Firefox update
• Passwords: The only constant in life
• Google integrates safe PDF viewer in Chrome
• Tricked again: Key combination opens Corsair's Padlock 2 flash drive without authorisation
• Trojan attacks now almost solely from legitimate websites
• Unforgettable: SD WORM cards up to 1 GB
• Geolocators become a privacy problem
• NuCaptcha Flash CAPTCHAs to combat spambots
• Phishing under the name of Wikipedia

Security Alerts

• Critical hole closed in PNG reference library
• Adobe Reader and Acrobat updates close 17 critical holes

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(djwm)