Big news from Mozilla and Samsung today: the two have been working on a new browsing engine together, developed from the ground-up to be completely new, and it's written entirely in Rust, a new safe systems language developed by Mozilla. "Rust, which today reached v0.6, has been in development for several years and is rapidly approaching stability. It is intended to fill many of the same niches that C++ has over the past decades, with efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. But beyond that, it is safe by default, preventing entire classes of memory management errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. Rust also features lightweight concurrency primitives that make it easy for programmers to leverage the power of the many CPU cores available on current and future computing platforms." The work is on-going, but of course, all code is out there right now.

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.

Joel Spolsky is ramping up the fight against patent trolls, the scourge of small companies and startups trying to advance technology in new and interesting ways. Sadly, while Spolsky is right on the money on everything, and even though the fight has to start somewhere, I think he - and others - are doing the industry a huge disservice by focussing entirely on pure patent trolls, without actually addressing the other side of the coin: medium and large business engaging in the same patent troll behaviour.

"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.

Ian G. Clifton: "Early on, iOS did a lot to push mobile devices forward and helped set bars in a lot of areas for other platforms to meet. Unfortunately, iOS has not changed much lately and in some ways hurts Android when used as the 'golden standard' due to its limitations. A lot of the harm isn't realized by consumers, but Android developers encounter it constantly when something has to be done 'the iOS way' or an Android feature is not even considered because iOS cannot do the same."

"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."

Last week, Facebook sent out an invite to a press event, to come check Facebook's 'New home on Android'. The press and bloggers went nuts, proclaiming that Facebook would fork Android and create its own phone. However, if you didn't wear the sensationalism-induced glasses, it was obvious from the invite itself that there would no forking of Android, and AndroidPolice confirmed it today.

"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."

"Today the ZFS on Linux project reached an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release! Over two years of use by real users has convinced us ZoL is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers."

"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."

Like many OSNews readers, I use Ubuntu. I also use several less popular distros. What is it like to use these lesser-known distros compared to the dominant systems? How does running, say, VectorLinux or Puppy or PC-BSD, differ from using Ubuntu or Fedora? This article offers a few ideas. Obviously, it broadly generalizes about distros for the purpose of discussion.

"Still, Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards."

"The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it was a large attack, sending 85Gbps of traffic. Since then, the attack got much worse. Here are some of the technical details of what we've seen."

"According to Kevin Restivo, an analyst at IDC, the countries where Windows Phone shipments exceeded those of iPhone during the fourth quarter were: Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine. A seventh 'country' where Windows Phone shipments beat iPhone is actually a group of smaller countries, including Croatia, that IDC lumps together in a category called 'rest of central and eastern Europe'." Not bad. Unsurprisingly, these are Nokia countries.