"A year ago today, Apple released a software update to halt the spread of the Flashback worm, a malware strain that infected more than 650,000 Mac OS X systems using a vulnerability in Apple's version of Java. This somewhat dismal anniversary is probably as good a time as any to publish some clues I've gathered over the past year that point to the real-life identity of the Flashback worm's creator."

Facebook has unveiled its Android launcher replacement, called Facebook Home, the Android launcher that's just perfect for those of us with perfect friends with perfect photos and a perfect life. Oh, and it'll get ads, too. No thanks, Facebook.

"Thanks to 35-year-old documents that have recently surfaced after three-plus decades in storage, we now know exactly how Apple navigated around that obstacle to create the company's first disk operating system. In more than a literal sense, it is also the untold story of how Apple booted up. From contracts - signed by both Wozniak and Jobs - to design specs to page after page of schematics and code, CNET had a chance to examine this document trove, housed at the DigiBarn computer museum in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, which shed important new light on those formative years at Apple."

"The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6. This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE." Look at those screenshots. This is what GNOME is supposed to be: elegant, understated, to-the-point. I should try this.

MacRumors has collected a few interesting quotes from people in the know about iOS 7. John Gruber: "What I've heard: iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it." It's going to be a "significant system-wide UI overhaul". It will apparently make people who love rich textures "sad". I honestly can't wait - I wonder what Apple's designers've got cooking for us.

Google has changed the way it's counting devices running particular Android versions. "Beginning in April, 2013, these charts are now built using data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play Store. Previously, the data was collected when the device simply checked-in to Google servers. We believe the new data more accurately reflects those users who are most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem." The change does actually make sense - reflecting the kind of usage developers are interested in - but the fact that this also makes Jelly Bean jump from 16% to 25% surely played an important role here too. This means that Ice Cream Sandwich and later now account for about 54% of Android devices in use.

"Kay says that some gadgets with superficial Dynabook-like qualities, such as the iPad, have not only failed to realize the Dynabook dream, but have in some senses betrayed it. That's one of the points he makes in this interview, conducted by computer historian David Greelish, proprietor of the Classic Computing Blog and organizer of this month's Vintage Computer Festival Southeast in Atlanta (the Festival will feature a pop-up Apple museum featuring Xerox's groundbreaking Alto workstation, which Kay worked on, as well as devices which deeply reflected his influence, including the Lisa, the original Macintosh and the Newton). Kay and Greelish also discuss Kay's experiences at some of the big outfits where he's worked, including Xerox's fabled PARC labs, Apple, Disney and HP. Today, Kay continues his research about children and technology at his own organization, the Viewpoints Research Institute." A great interview with this legendary man.

"Already a bit of a legend in China, the 40-year-old serial entrepreneur announced last April that he had formed Smartisan Co., Ltd. to work on a smartphone OS, and that it would shame all manufacturers with its revolutionary user experience. Having missed the December target that he promised, Luo eventually took the stage in Beijing last week to spend well over three - yes, three - hours going through the thought process behind his Smartisan OS, so bear with us here." The icons are nice, and there's certainly some nice touches in there, but calling this an 'operating system' is stretching the definition beyond its breaking point.

"The ReactOS project is rapidly developing. One of the developers participating in this project suggested that we re-analyzed the source code, as the code base is growing fast. We were glad to do that. We like this project, and we'll be happy if this article helps the developers to eliminate some bugs. Analysis was performed with the PVS-Studio 5.02 code analyzer."

A lot of interesting stuff on the internals of one of the greatest games of all time: Pac-Man. First, recreating Pac-Man in a day. Second, a very detailed look at the artificial intelligence of each of the game's ghosts. As it turns out, each ghost had its own 'character' and approached Pac-Man in its own unique way. Third, the Pac-Man Dossier, the most detailed study of the game ever.

"Last Friday, The Verge revealed the existence of a dead-simple URL-based hack that allowed anyone to reset your Apple ID password with just your email address and date of birth. Apple quickly shut down the site and closed the security hole before bringing it back online. The conventional wisdom is that this was a run-of-the-mill software security issue. It isn't. It's a troubling symptom that suggests Apple's self-admittedly bumpy transition from a maker of beautiful devices to a fully-fledged cloud services provider still isn't going smoothly. Meanwhile, your Apple ID password has come a long way from the short string of characters you tap to update apps on your iPhone. It now offers access to Apple's entire ecosystem of devices, stores, software, and services."

"Not only has China's Central TV been running regular follow ups to its March 15 expose on Apple's iPhone repair policies, but on Thursday People's Daily - the Communist Party's official propaganda organ - attacked the company for the fourth day in a row, devoting half a page to negative articles." This isn't rocket science. The west treats Chinese technology companies like crap, so they treat western companies like crap. How exactly does this surprise anyone? And why is it okay for our governments to engage in political games to smear foreign companies, but we throw a hissy fit when a foreign nation engages in the same political games to smear western companies? It sucks for Apple to be the target right now, but had this occurred a decade ago, it would have been Microsoft.

"Last Friday Oliver and I met up to discuss the state of things and how we intend to proceed. The run-time support for package management in Haiku (in the package management branch, of course) is in pretty good shape already. With the system itself and all the third-party software living in packages the system boots and is fully functional."

This. This is what we need. These are the kind of steps from which we all benefit. Google has just announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge: the company promises not to sue any users, distributors, or developers of open source products based on the patents it owns (unless first attacked).