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Two bugs in Rails and a bug in the JSON gem expose Ruby on Rails applications to new attacks, some of which involve the possibility of remote code execution. Updating is recommended

In this article are benchmarks of the past two Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS) compared to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development state. Being looked at specifically for this round of testing is the AMD Radeon Linux graphics performance with the latest open-source driver compared to an older Catalyst driver. For an AMD Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, the current state of the open-source graphics driver on Linux is beginning to outperform an old AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 for select Linux OpenGL games.

It may not come as a surprise to anyone who regularly reads my column that I tried to be first in line to order the Raspberry Pi. I mean, what's not to like in a $35, 700MHz, 256MB of RAM computer with HDMI out that runs Linux? In the end, I didn't make the first batch of 10,000, but I wasn't too far behind either.

Chris Wilson announced a couple of days ago a new development version of the Cairo 2D graphics library, which fixes a few bugs found in previous releases.

Canonical announced a few minutes ago, February 12, in a security notice, that a new kernel upgrade for its Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system is available, fixing four vulnerabilities found by various developers in the Linux 3.0 kernel packages.

Craig Lamparter announced a few days ago that version 9.25 of the Ubuntu Management Component Pack for HP ProLiant servers is now available for download/update.

Will enable cross-platform Java-based UIs – but why? Oracle says it plans to open source the Android and iOS implementations of its JavaFX UI platform "over the next couple months," which it says will allow Java developers to use the technology to write cross-platform smartphone apps for the first time.…

Jeffrey Ratcliffe had the pleasure of announcing a couple of days ago a new release of his gscan2pdf open source software, which helps users produce a multipage DjVu or PDF file from a scan.

The annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is now preparing for the 2013 cycle of the program which sees Google offer student developers stipends to write code for a wide range of open source projects. Google is assisted by a number of mentoring organisations around the world who help the students achieve their goal of completing enhancements and improvements to open source projects. This will be the ninth year that GSoC has run; over the past eight years, six thousand students have completed the program.

The Linux desktop has long been about two key items, the actual desktop environment and the apps that run on it. This past week saw major advances in both fronts.

Modern copyright law grants copyright automatically to any creative work, including simple things like blog posts – and small pieces of code on github. This default copyright creates an assumption that for someone to do anything further with someone else's creative work requires permission from the author—what Lawrence Lessig calls "the permission culture." The open license ecosystem often takes this permission culture for granted, rather than fighting back—and that may be contributing to the proliferation of unlicensed code.

The international Firefox OS App days event finished just over a week ago, giving people a chance to make their own apps for Firefox OS

ROSA community members have prepared a variation of ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 operating system with GNOME desktop environment.

It was alarming to read in the recent article The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 by Dr. Dobb's editor, Andrew Binstock, that Perl was "continuing its long decline" and was in""an irretrievable tailspin," based on statistics from Google searches. Nothing in the article discussed what was lacking feature-wise in the language that might be behind this decline. While I am not an authority on programming languages, I thought it was only appropriate to reflect on the strengths of Perl that I've relied on during my 14-year affair with the language.

Thunar is the default file manager for XFCE desktops. While it is easy to integrate DropBox into Nautilus, the default file manager for GNOME, it is not so trivial for Thunar. This guide explains how to use DropBox with the Thunar file manager on a Fedora 18 XFCE desktop.

Four or five years ago, if a blog or two had whispered, “Pssst, hey–Microsoft is thinking of releasing a Linux port of Office,” the FOSS blogosphere would have lit-up so brightly that it could be seen from the International Space Station. Man, it would’ve been a crazy week. People would be writing about how suspicious they were, or happy, or sad, or filled with feelings of doom. Some would’ve said it means nothing until Adobe signs on with Photoshop. Others would’ve cussed and said “we don’t need no stinkin’ Microsoft Office.” Lots of us would have been warning folks to stay focused on our FOSS roots, our belief that software should be free, while pointing out that even Microsoft is welcome to offer their goods on Linux for any price they want to charge.

eScholar's only business is helping state and local education agencies get the best bang for their buck from collecting and using educational data to drive better school performance results. That sometimes involves helping its customers work with data gleaned from a variety of commercial and open source enterprise databases.

RhinoLINUX 5.0 is available. RhinoLinux is an Ubuntu-based desktop-oriented distribution which aims to provide many different desktop environments, including GNOME, KDE, MATE, Unity and Xfce.

There's a story going around that Microsoft might be porting Office to Linux. If you believe this story, I have a wonderful, lightly used bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you for a mere million dollars cash. You can run MS-Office on Linux today with WINE or Crossover, but running it natively on Linux is a pipe-dream. Is this technically possible? Sure. In fact, you can run Microsoft Office on Linux today by using WINE or its commercial big brother, CodeWeavers' Crossover Linux. I've done it myself. WINE and Crossover runs Office, and other Windows applications, on Linux by providing an implementation of the Windows API (application programming interface) on top of Linux.

Slick, a database access library for the Scala language designed by Typesafe, has reached its 1.0 release milestone. Slick allows developers to write their database queries in Scala instead of a database native language like SQL, reaping the benefits of static checking and compile time safety afforded by the library's query compiler. The tool can be extended to interface with several different database backends and allows developers to access the data stored in it as if they were directly using Scala collections. For example, creating a table would look like: