"What happens when anyone can develop and publish an application to the Android Market? A 472% increase in Android malware samples since July 2011." A study by The Global Threat Center over at Juniper Networks details mobile attacks that are increasing both in numbers and sophistication. This contrasts to the iPhone, more secure in part due to Apple's proprietary hold over the platform through its review process.

At MineCon in Las Vegas yesterday and today, Mojang has officially released Minecraft 1.0, signalling the end of the phenomenon's alpha and beta testing phase. It's been an interesting journey, and I've been playing the game since early summer 2010 - so it's weird to see it hit final now. Game of the year? Well, no, that title obviously goes to Skyrim - but for a game like Minecraft to be even considered for such a title is amazing enough. Thanks, Notch and the rest of the Mojang team!

The saga surrounding SOPA will be dominating the headlines for a while yet, and today is no different. First of all, and most importantly, the European Parliament has adopted a resolution against SOPA, while also calling for net neutrality to become part of EU law. Second, and this is also interesting, we now have a list of software companies which are against freedom of speech on the web. Unsurprisingly, Apple and Microsoft are on this list. Update: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has spoken out against SOPA. Update II: Tumbler's anti-SOPA message on their website generated almost 90000 (!) phone calls to representatives. Amazing.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses why code analysis and similar metrics provide little insight into what really makes an effective software development team, in the wake of a new scorecard system employed at IBM. "Code metrics are fine if all you care about is raw code production. But what happens to all that code once it's written? Do you just ship it and move on? Hardly - in fact, many developers spend far more of their time maintaining code than adding to it. Do your metrics take into account time spent refactoring or documenting existing code? Is it even possible to devise metrics for these activities?" McAllister writes, "Are developers who take time to train and mentor other teams about the latest code changes considered less productive than ones who stay heads-down at their desks and never reach out to their peers? How about teams that take time at the beginning of a project to coordinate with other teams for code reuse, versus those who charge ahead blindly? Can any automated tool measure these kinds of best practices?"

A New York Times guest editorial titled Stop the Great Firewall of America says "China operates the world's most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress... is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China's Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America." The culprit is the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act. Sounds good until you read that "The bills empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial." Rather like the Department of Homeland Security's seizure of websites for copyright violations without the constitutionally-required court orders. If you're not an American citizen, why should you care? Read this Techdirt article telling how the U.S. seized a Spanish domain name that had already been declared legal by the Spanish courts.

And another popular Linux distribution pushes a new release out the door. This time around, it's openSUSE, as they just released version 12.1. Other than the usual latest and greatest version of all the open source desktops and associated tools, there's a few other interesting tidbits in this release as well.

Google today announced a new Google Music Store, with partnership of 3 out of the 4 major labels, and lots of indie ones. Additionally, they announced free cloud music service for up to 20,000 songs, and lots of exclusive content, and "social" features like "free streaming for your friends after you buy a song or album". Read on for a short commentary.

Almost two weeks ago, the European Union announced that it had started a preliminary investigation into the use of standards-essential patents in all the legal cases between Apple and Samsung. Everybody assumed this was a response to an official complaint by Apple, but the EU has now clarified that it started the investigation on its own accord. In related news, Samsung has circumvented Apple's injunction in Germany by slightly altering the design of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 - the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N is now, once again, for sale in Deutschland.

DigitalPersona has open sourced its new MINEX-certified FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology. FingerJetFX, Open Source Edition (OSE), is free, portable software that device manufacturers and application developers can use to convert bulky fingerprint images into small, mathematical representations called fingerprint "templates" for efficient storage or comparison.

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Oracle NoSQL Database, the company's take on the distributed key-value data store for the enterprise. 'There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects. You get a number of different options for increasing the durability in the face of a node crash or trading that durability for speed,' Wayner writes. 'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role. Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance to the sweet spot of the enterprise market.'

OSNews writing about social networks? Yes, it happens, and today is one of those days. We all know Facebook is king here, with a massive userbase and a seemingly unbreakable hold over the market, with Twitter covering the more public side of social networking. Google does some stuff in a fringe somewhere with something called Google+ which tries to combine Facebook and Twitter, but it's effectively a ghost town with a confusing interface. So, if you're Microsoft, what are you going to do? Well, build your own social network, of course!

You may not realise it, but today one of the most important pieces of technology celebrates its 40th birthday. In November 15, 1971, a company called Intel released its Intel 4004 processor - the first single-chip microprocessor, and one of the most important milestones in computer history.

Finally! Jean-Baptiste Queru (yes, husband of) has announced the source code release for Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich (technically, it's 4.0.1). Naturally, this code dump also happens to include the source code for Honeycomb - however, due to Honeycomb's incomplete nature, there's no tags available for it. Not interesting from a let's-build-it-and-code-point of view, but it is interesting for ROM hackers - bring it on, ICS for my Galaxy SII!

It's no secret OSNews has a bit of a thing for the BeOS. I can only speak for myself, obviously, but relatively speaking, BeOS was the best operating system ever made. The man who started all this was Jean-Louis Gassee, former executive at Apple, who founded Be, Inc. in 1991. In the second half of the '90s, Apple was looking for a replacement for its heavily outdated Mac OS, after several failed attempts at developing its own - it came down to Steve Jobs NeXT, or BeOS. Be didn't make it, and Gassee is happier for it.