19 December 2009, 08:00

The H Week - Update Checking, Oracle/MySQL and GPL violations

The H Week

This week – The H launches a new Update Check service to identify and replace old software (with known vulnerabilities) with the latest version. Oracle reassures the MySQL community, Novell simplifies its infrastructure and Microsoft comes to an agreement with the European Commission over the browser antitrust case. Google offer a new URL shortening service, Adobe says it won't budge from its scheduled updates and Twitter gets cracked again.

Features

The H published three features this week; a look at this winters Linux distributions updates, a report on the recent Android developers conference in London and an interview with Joe Brockmeier of openSUSE.

Open Source News

Linux 2.6.33 will include the nouveau graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. Prompted by the delays in the Sun Microsystems aquisition and continuing pressure from prominent figures in the open source and MySQL world, Oracle made a further statement about its commitment to the healthy future of MySQL. Novell announced that in response to changing market conditions it was reorganising its existing four divisions, or units, down to two. Microsoft and the European Commission finally came to an agreement and in future copies of Windows sold in Europe will offer a choice of internet browser, including the open source variety. Mark Shuttleworth has announced that he will step down as CEO of Canonical in order to focus on product design, partnerships and customers. Following the recent spate of litigation over violations of open source licenses, OpenLogic have announced their open source fulfillment service which will guide companies using open source code in their products through the pitfalls of open source licensing.

Security News

This week, The H launched a new service for Windows users. The H Update Check scans Windows machines and identifies old versions of software which may be vulnerable to attack. Google now offer their own URL shortening service with goo.gl. Google say their service is stable, fast and secure, although for the time being it is only available via the Google Toolbar or FeedBurner. Google's reCAPTCHA authentication system also made the news this week, with Google denying claims reCAPTCHA was vulnerable to a new automated script procedure. Although a critical vulnerability has recently been found in Reader and Acrobat, Adobe say they will stick to their recently adopted regular release schedule and an update will not be available until January 2010. Twitter once again fell foul of a cracker and for a brief time on Friday users found themselves looking at a web page claiming to represent the "Iranian Cyber Army".

Open Source Releases

Notable open source releases this week include ironPython 2.6. IronPython is an open source implementation of the Python language which is tightly integrated with the Microsoft .NET framework. Also .NET related are the releases of Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2, Mono being an alternative .NET compatible framework and MonoDevelop an Integrated Development Environment for .NET related languages that runs on the Mono platform. Moonlight 2 is another Novell Mono supported application, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight. On the content management front, while webEdition moves to version 6.0.0..7, ImpressCMS reaches version 1.2.

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.

(crve)

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