The H Roundup - Debian 7, Blender 2.67 and your next language

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: Dj Walker-Morgan looks at how open source changed programming, Debian Wheezy is released, Blender now renders models in cartoon style, hackers gained access to all .edu domains, and Linux is the "benchmark of quality".

Features

This week, Dj Walker-Morgan looks at how open source changed what programming is and how that affects what programming language someone should learn next.

• Your next language or how open source changed programming

Top News

The latest Blender release not only renders photo-realistic 3D models but can now also turn them into cartoon style images. Meanwhile, the Debian developers have finally released Debian 7 – Wheezy – which in turn has triggered a number of other distributions to update. On the mobile side of things, Mozilla has made the latest version of its simulator for Firefox OS applications available.

• Blender 2.67 renders cartoons
• Debian 7 "Wheezy" released
• Debian release triggers distribution updates
• Firefox OS Simulator 3.0 now available

Hackers say they briefly gained access to the registrar for all .edu domains earlier this year, a German trojan has become so vicious that it is actually downloading child pornography to its victims' computers, and D-Link has released security updates for a number of its products that allowed attackers to compromise them and, in the case of a number of IP cameras, also access their video output as ASCII graphics.

• Hackers gain access to all .edu domains
• Child pornography trojan becomes more aggressive
• D-Link update closes voyeur's ASCII peephole

The latest release of the Cinnamon desktop environment includes support for desktop widgets, LibreOffice is now Gatekeeper compliant on Mac OS X and Linux has been called a "benchmark of quality" in the latest Coverity Scan report.

• Cinnamon 1.8 adds desklet support
• LibreOffice 4.0.3 now Gatekeeper compliant
• Linux still "benchmark of quality" in this year's Coverity Scan

Open Source Releases

Open source releases this week included systemd, phpMyAdmin, a major new version of OpenNebula, and version 2.0 of PyPy, which supports Stackless. OpenStreetMap has rolled out a completely redesigned map editor to its users.

• Systemd 203 release to start up Fedora 19
• phpMyAdmin 4.0 moves on from HTML frames
• Phusion Passenger goes fourth
• Graph processing platform Apache Giraph reaches 1.0
• OpenStreetMap launches new map editor
• Ceph improves Red Hat support in new release
• OpenNebula 4.0 debuts new admin interface
• Python-accelerating PyPy 2.0 for x86 released
  

Development releases included a first release candidate for the next version of CyanogenMod and an alpha release of the ARM version of PyPy 2.0 with Raspberry Pi support.

• CyanogenMod 10.1 "quickly approaching" with release candidate
• PyPy 2.0 alpha on ARM includes Pi support

Security Alerts

Security alerts that have to be taken into account this week include a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that can be circumvented with a "Fix It" workaround from Microsoft and will most likely be fixed in the company's Patch Tuesday releases, a major flaw in several versions of NGINX, and a critical hole in Adobe's ColdFusion.

• Exploit for new IE8 0-day vulnerability in the wild
• NGINX patches major security flaw
• Microsoft releases "Fix It" for IE8 hole
• Adobe acknowledges critical hole in ColdFusion

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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