The H Week - SCO, Sony PS3, IE patches and politicised botnet

Over the past week The H has published three features and reported on the latest in the string of SCO Group litigations, on Sony's announcement it will drop Linux support for all PS3s and on the latest developments for GNOME, MeeGo and Ubuntu. Microsoft has released more IE patches, recent PHP improvements have proved to be flawed, the US government has banned P2P on it's PCs and a botnet has been used to attack blogs critical of the Vietnamese government.

Featured

Features this week included a look at lightweight Linux desktops by Richard Hillesley, Robert Seetzen discussing the progressive dilution of European interoperability standards and Thorsten Leemhuis examined the new RHEL 5.5.

• Minimalist Linux desktops
• Watering down European standards
• What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5

Open Source

The jury in the latest of the string of SCO Group litigations decided that Novell did not sell the Unix copyrights. Although Sony announced this week that the next PS3 firmware revision won't support Linux or other operating systems on any model, hacker George Hotz has promised he will produce an unofficial version of the firmware that will provide the alternate OS option. The Ruby community has raised sponsorship for a Ruby Summer of Code programme. The GNOME developers released the last major point release in the 2.x series of the desktop environment before moving on to the 3.x series. The MeeGo project released its first version of the code. iMatix has announced it will drop OpenAMQ support in favour of ZeroMQ. A Mozilla market study shows 40% browser share in Europe. Mark Shuttleworth promises "bold new moves" as he dubs Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat".

• SCO vs Linux: Jury decides Novell own the Unix copyright
• Sony to block Linux from all PS3 systems
• Hacker promises Linux on PS3 will live on
• Ruby Summer of Code raises $100,000
• GNOME 2.30 released
• First MeeGo code release
• iMatix to drop OpenAMQ support by 2011
• Mozilla: Firefox holds nearly 40 per cent market share in Europe
• Ubuntu 10.10 to be Maverick Meerkat
  

Open Source Releases

• NexentaStor 3.0.0 Community Edition released
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 Beta released
• Apache CouchDB 0.11.0 loses the alpha/beta tag
• KDE SC 4.4.2 arrives with various bug fixes
• OXID eShop 4.3.0 e-commerce platform released
• WordPress for Android 1.1 arrives
• digiKam 1.2.0 adds multithreading
• Vyatta 6.0 adds IPv6 and firewall improvements
• Public-i open sources ePetition software

Security

Microsoft released extensive out-of-cycle patches for holes in Internet Explorer. The recent PHP improvements are shown to be flawed as the 'random' session ID numbers are still guessable. OpenSSL 1.0.0 has been released, incorporating a number of new encryption standards, while a vulnerability to malformed records has been reported for current OpenSSL versions. The US government has passed a bill banning P2P file sharing applications from the PCs of government employees. Mozilla's developers have announced their intention to close an ancient CSS hole. A botnet was used to mount DDoS attacks on the blogs of Vietnamese dissidents.

• Microsoft to release out of cycle patch for IE
• Ten birds with one stone - Microsoft patches Internet Explorer
• PHP blunders with random numbers
• OpenSSL 1.0.0 arrives
• US government employees face file sharing ban
• 'Record of Death' takes out OpenSSL servers
• Firefox developers block old CSS leak
• Botnet attacks blogs by Vietnamese dissidents
  

Alerts

• Apple releases Mac OS X 10.6.3 update
• Java 6 Update 19 closes 26 security holes
• PDF exploit requires no specific security hole to function
• Mozilla updates Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and older Firefox browsers
• QuickTime update patches 16 vulnerabilities
• Firefox 3.6.3 closes a critical hole

To see all last week's news see The H's last seven days of news and 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.

(trk)