The H Week - Oracle's plans, licence changes, false alarms and backdoors

This week, the H had the latest on what's going into the next Linux kernel with Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.33 (Part 2) - Storage, we looked at the problem of URL shorteners in Shortened-breaks and showed The H's own contribution to helping solve it. Meanwhile there were changes in UK Government open source policies, new open source releases and previews, false alarms, backdoors and more...

Features

The H published one feature this week which posed the question - when is Linux not Linux? This was prompted by the growing use of the Linux Kernel to power smart devices, such as phones, which do not present to the user as anything resembling Linux as represented by the major distributions.

• When is it worth saying it's Linux?

Open Source

The UK Government updated its open source policy again, but missed adding a timetable and Alfresco changed the license on their open source enterprise CMS to LGPL. Oracle laid out their plans for Sun's technology assets and closed Project Kenai. Ingres started previewing its database acceleration technology and Bacula says there's been a million downloads of its backup software.

• UK Government upgrades Open Source policy
• Alfresco to drop GPL, goes LGPL
• Oracle to hire and invest in hardware and software
• Project Kenai a casualty of Oracle acquisition
• Ingres previews "VectorWise" technology
• Bacula backup software reaches one million downloads

Open Source Releases

• Mozilla releases Firefox for Maemo RC3, disables Adobe Flash
• Google releases Chrome 4.0 for Windows
• Weave 1.0, Mozilla's Firefox bookmark sync extension, released
• Apache Jackrabbit 2.0 released with full JCR 2.0 support
• BonitaSoft releases Bonita Open Solution 5.0
• KDE SC 4.3.5 released
• KDE SC 4.4 RC2 arrives
• Canonical releases Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS

Security

Kaspersky set off false alarms over Google ads, developers found the e107 CMS had a backdoor which was inserted into the code after the e107 site had been compromised and Google's Toolbar was found not to turn off properly. Google plans to reward attacks on Chrome, the internal attacker was revealed as a myth, ISPs looked glumly forward to more DDoS attacks and researchers called the "Verified by Visa" scheme a text book example of how not to do authentication.

• Kaspersky produces false alarms with Google ads
• Possible backdoor in the e107 CMS
• Privacy issue in Google Toolbar fixed
• Google invites attacks on Chrome
• Study confirms demise of the myth of attacks from within
• Internet Service Providers have a pessimistic view of the future
• Researchers criticise 3D Secure credit card authentication

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.

(djwm)