40 minutes and physical access. That's all russian company ElcomSoft is claiming to need in order to crack the 256-bit hardware encryption Apple uses to protect the data on iOS 4 devices. Full access to everything that's stored inside, including "historical information such as geolocation data, browsing history, call history, text messages and emails, usernames, data deleted by the user", is obtained.

I'm going to become short of suitable title suffixes pretty shortly... Anyhow, I have also reviewed interrupts on the MOS 6502 for the sake of extreme completeness, bust most importantly have tried to address some very incomplete and misleading statements of the interrupt handling model about pop-up threads and service-providing processes in a rather extensive way, see this post.

We've already talked about Windows 8 so often you'd almost forget it had not yet been officially confirmed by Microsoft. Well, Steve Ballmer has announced that yes, it's going to be called Windows 8, and yes, it's going to arrive in 2012. "We're obviously hard at work on the next version of Windows," Ballmer said, "Windows 7 PCs will sell over 350 million units this year. We've done a lot in Windows 7 to improve customer satisfaction. We have a brand new user interface. We've added touch, and ink, and speech. And yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there's a whole lot more coming. As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8. Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors." Right-o. Update: A company spokesperson has retracted the statement, but whatever, we're not stupid.

Zero Install, the decentralised cross-distribution software installation system, announced 0install 1.0 today, after 8 years in development. 0install allows software developers to publish programs directly from their own web-sites, while supporting features familiar from centralised distribution repositories such as shared libraries, automatic updates and digital signatures. It complements, rather than replaces, the OS's package management. As well as allowing developers to create a single package that works across Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X and Windows, it could help make software available on more minor platforms. OSNews covered decentralised installation systems in 2007.

MeetMeego.org has the dirt on the details of Nokia's next two MeeGo devices . To sum up: the first device, the (very) long-awaited N9, has a similar design to the N900 - a horizontal sliding 4-line keyboard, but this time with a tiltable screen, a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8-based processor, a 12MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens, and HDMI out. It will be a developer device, distributed at developer conferences such as the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in a couple of days.

It's about time! Microsoft has just detailed its next update to Windows Phone 7. This update, codenamed 'Mango', will bump the version number from 7.0.7 to 7.1, and will include 500 new features (how Redmond reached that number, god only knows). The developer tools are out in beta form today. There's a lot of cool stuff in there, such as the already known pseudo-multitasking and the hardware accelerated Internet Explorer 9, but also a lot of stuff we didn't know anything about. Also, news on new hardware partners, and, of course, Nokia.

"After months of development, Fedora 15, codenamed "Lovelock" has finally been released today." Highlights of this release include restart-free firewall configuration, a switch to Gnome 3, LibreOffice, PowerTOP 2.x and systemd, "Consistent Network Device Naming", and... Rupee symbol support for Indian users.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has officially confirmed today, during a developer conference in Tokyo, that the next version of Windows will be called Windows 8 and will debut in 2012. More details on Windows 8 could emerge at the upcoming D: All Things Digital conference, where Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows division of Microsoft, is scheduled to "talk about the future of Windows in the era of all kinds of new devices and the cloud".

Yes, it's still being updated. OS/2 eComStation 2.1 has been released by Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV. The market for eComStation may not be particularly huge, but it still has its niches here and there. Since there might be folks here that aren't in the know: eComStation is the commercial continuation of IBM's OS/2, developed to support modern hardware.

Apple has responded to the recent patent threats again iOS application developers by Lodsys. Bruce Sewell, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, sent a letter to Lodsys CEO Mark Small detailing why the threats are baseless. Apple claims they have a license to the patents in question, and that the iOS application developers are mere customers - not distributors.

Version 2.6.39 once again took Linus Torvalds and his fellow developers less than 70 days to complete. This is further indication of a slight, though ever more apparent, increase in the kernel's development speed, as about 80 to 90 days still passed between the release of two versions one or two years ago. With 2.6.39, this also meant that there was a slight decrease in the number of advancements which are worth mentioning in the Kernel Log; however, there are still plenty of changes that will make Linux faster and better.

I have personally tried to pretty much let the whole MAC Defender trojan thing pass by, since we're not a security website. However, we have an interesting turn of events this week. An article over at Ars Technica quotes several anonymous Apple Store employees as saying that the infection rate of Macs brought into the Apple store has gone up considerably. More interestingly though, Apple's official policy states that Apple Store employees are not allowed to talk about infections to anyone - they're not even allowed to inform Mac owners if they find the infection without the customer's knowledge. Another interesting tidbit: Apple mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company Macs, according to one Apple Store genius.

Wait - is this for real? A large American company openly defying the anti-freedom and totalitarian content industry? In comments in the UK media, Google chairman Eric Schmidt took aim at the big content-sponsored PROTECT IP act. The PROTECT IP act is the US internet censorship (the China kind) law, which more or less takes aim directly against Google. In his criticism, Schmidt went far - very far. The content industry obviously isn't pleased.

Having read the feedback resulting from my previous post on interrupts (itself resulting from an earlier OSnews Asks item on the subject), I've had a look at the way interrupts work on PowerPC v2.02, SPARC v9, Alpha and IA-64 (Itanium), and contribute this back to anyone who's interested (or willing to report any blatant flaw found in my posts). I've also tried to rework a bit my interrupt handling model to make it significantly clearer and have it look more like a design doc and less like a code draft.