16 February 2013, 11:57

The H Roundup - Death, zombies, obsolescence and zero-days

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, Chrome stopped declaring RHEL 6 obsolete, Raspbmc turned the Raspberry Pi into a media centre, US TV channels declared the zombie apocalypse, the Samsung UEFI bug was confirmed as not having been fixed, Glyn Moody asked if we need open source licences at all, and Thorsten Leemhuis looked forward to upcoming features in Linux 3.8.

Top News

Google has delivered a tweak to Chrome that will stop the browser from calling Red Hat's current Enterprise Linux offering "obsolete", but there are still problems for older Linux systems. It turned out that the "Packet of Death" with some of Intel's Ethernet interfaces was not actually Intel's fault, and the discovery of a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader caused alarm.

Greg Kroah-Hartman proposed a kernel-level implementation of D-Bus, a hacker got several US TV channels to report that the dead were rising from their graves and were attacking the living, and Raspbmc delivered an easy-to-use media centre image for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer.

Matthew Garrett did some further investigation into the Samsung UEFI bug and found the problem can also be caused from within Windows, Opera abandoned its proprietary rendering engine for Chromium and WebKit, cURL suffered from a security problem, and open source developers looked at ways to improve online discussion.

Featured Articles

This week, Glyn Moody asked the question why we need open source licences and whether we could do without them, and Thorsten Leemhuis took a look at the infrastructure and driver updates coming in the next version of Linux in the latest two installments of the Kernel Log.

Open Source Releases

The open source software releases of the week included Chef 11, the Linux Foundation's Secure Boot bootloader, the latest version of the DigiKam photo management software, and Secure Boot support in the latest maintenance release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Development releases saw the arrival of Firefox's Windows 8 UI in the Nightly branch of the browser, and a JavaScript library that lets WebRTC-enabled browsers find each other and communicate.

Security Alerts

Ruby on Rails fixed more security holes, Adobe Reader suffered from a zero-day hole and the company reacted by recommending a workaround... turning on a security feature that should already have been on.

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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