A New Way of Measuring Openness: The Open Governance Index

Open Source 6 Comments
"Much has been said about open source projects - and open source platforms are now powering an ever-increasing share of the mobile market. But what is 'open' and how can you measure openness? As part of our new research report, VisionMobile Research Partner Liz Laffan introduces the Open Governance Index - a new approach to measuring the 'openness' of software projects, from Android to WebKit."
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Google: Campaign Against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple

Google 112 Comments
This I didn't expect. While we've had individual people high up Google's chain of command speak out, there wasn't yet any form of official response to the patent shenanigans surrounding Android. For the first time, the company has posted on the official Google Blog about the issue, and the company is clear. Several companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, are working together to attack Android through patents. Google is not going to sit back and take it, though. Update: Stuff just got real. Popcorn! Or better yet, coffee!
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Windows 8 Hyper-v and MinWin: A Game Changing Strategy?

Windows 6 Comments
Microsoft seems to be "all in" with its virtualization strategy these days: back in June we heard word of a client-hypervisor (Hyper-V 3.0) built into Windows 8 and in mid-July, Hyper-V for the upcoming Windows Server 8 was publicly unveiled. And I've dug up evidence of a much bigger presence of MinWin in Microsoft's upcoming OS. So how is this fitting together? Is this the ultimate virtualization trio?
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Memshrink Helps Firefox Beat Chrome at Its Own Game: Performance

  Submitted by _xmv Mozilla, Gecko 29 Comments
Mozilla Firefox has been listening to recent memory complains, and as a side effect tested the browser's scalability to the extreme with memshrink's improvements. The results are shocking: For 150 tabs open using the test script, Firefox nightly takes 6 min 14 on the test system, uses 2GB and stays responsive. For the same test, Chrome takes 28 min 55 and is unusable during loading. An optimized version of the script has been made for Chrome as an attempt to work-around Chrome's limitations and got an improved loading time of 27 min 58, while using 5GB of memory.
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PC-BSD 9.0 Follows FreeBSD Release Cycle, Releases Beta

  Submitted by vermaden PC-BSD 9 Comments
Some highlights: PC-BSD 9 supports multiple DEs (GNOME2/XFCE4/LXDE) instead of being KDE4 only desktop, new revised PBI system that allows sharing of files and libraries between applications for reduced disk space, new AppCafe to allow easy browsing, installing and managing applications in PC-BSD system. Also the PC-BSD Control Panel has and one-stop access to a variety of system-configuration options.
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Linus Torvalds Not a Fan of Gnome 3

  Submitted by Sin2x Gnome 207 Comments
Linus Torvalds piped up in the comments of a Google+ posting by Linux kernel hacker Dave Jones to air his true feelings about Gnome 3: "it's not that I have rendering problems with gnome3 (although I do have those too), it's that the user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is unacceptable." People care what Linus thinks, and when he ditched KDE for Gnome a couple of years ago, people took note. Now he's using Xfce.
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5 Ways To Fight Mobile Malware

Privacy, Security 9 Comments
A new Trojan horse app has emerged to target Android devices, and this one's particularly creepy. The app records a user's phone calls and then uploads them to a remote server. The app was revealed Tuesday by security researcher Dinesh Venkatesan on the Security Advisor Research Blog, published by CA Technologies, now known as Total Defense. While this particular Trojan doesn't appear to be a threat in the wild--at least not for North American users--it's a good reminder of the growing threat of mobile malware.
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Galaxy Tab 10.1 To Be Sold in Australia After All

Legal 3 Comments
Yesterday, the web was ablaze about how the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 wouldn't be sold in Australia due the patent dispute between Apple and Samsung. Turns out the story was blown out of proportion. Official statement from Samsung explains it all: "Apple Inc. filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia involving a Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia. No injunction was issued by the court and the parties in the case reached a mutual agreement which stipulates that the variant in question will not be sold in Australia. A Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 for the Australian market will be released in the near future. This undertaking does not affect any other Samsung smartphone or tablet available in the Australian market or other countries. Samsung will continue to actively defend and protect our intellectual property to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communication business."
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Meet Comex, The iPhone Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

Apple 2 Comments
Interesting portrait of Comex over at Forbes. "Dino Dai Zovi, co-author of the Mac Hacker's Handbook, says JailbreakMe's sophistication is on par with that of Stuxnet, a worm thought to have been designed by the Israeli or U.S. government to infect Iran's nuclear facilities. He compares Allegra's skills to the state-sponsored intruders that plague corporations and governments, what the cybersecurity industry calls 'advanced-persistent threat' hackers: 'He's probably five years ahead of them', says Dai Zovi."
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