"In an attempt to woo its Android developer base, Samsung recently shipped a number of its smartphones to members of a highly popular phone modification group. On Monday, four members of the CyanogenMod software team received Galaxy S II smartphones in the mail, direct from the company at no charge." Step by step, hardware makers are getting the message.

"FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release. I caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7."

Mozilla Labs has introduced its concept of a desktop replacement called Webian Shell. The Webian Shell basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications.

I've been keeping you up to date about the situation around net neutrality in The Netherlands - and today, everything finally came to its logical conclusion. During a debate in our lower house, most of the kinks were ironed out, and our minister of economic affairs, Maxime Verhagen, will now turn net neutrality into law. This means that after Chile, The Netherlands will be the second country in the world to do so.

Bob Cringeley makes a bold statement in a blog post responding to Apple's iCloud announcement: "Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows." He says, "The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps."

RIM has pushed the second update of the QNX-based operating system running on the PlayBook. One of the new features listed? "The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet can now be charged even when fully powered down." Oh my.

"The FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems announced today their commitment to support the efforts of World IPv6 Day to accelerate global IPv6 deployment. Earlier this year, the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems jointly awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to create an IPv6-only version of the FreeBSD and PC-BSD open source operating systems."

Apple just held its keynote thing to signal the start of its Worldwide Developers Conference. The big three things Apple talked about were Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, and its new internet service, iCloud.

The German city of Hamburg will soon be getting one of the biggest Apple Stores in the world. Construction isn't complete yet, and a group of people calling themselves the '.WAV Collective' decided it was time for a practical joke. Posing as construction workers, they planted an interesting logo on the store's facade. In broad daylight. And they videotaped it.

Okay, so building up on the feedback given on the previous item on that topic (thanks everyone, and xiaokj, Alfman and Brendan in particular!), I have tried to improve the design of my daemon and service model a bit further. Here is the new version, feel free to study and discuss it!

"The hacker group LulzSec on Thursday posted information it took from Sony Entertainment and Sony BMG on its site, called the LulzBoat. The information includes about a million usernames and passwords of customers in the U.S., Netherlands and Belgium and is available for download and posted on the group's site. A release posted on LulzSec's page said the group has more, but can't copy all of the information it stole. The group also said none of the information it took from Sony was encrypted."

Netbook innovator Asustek has announced that it will ship three models of its Eee PC with Ubuntu 10.10 preinstalled. Canonical announced Asus' decision to load the Eee PC 1001PXD, 1011PX and 1015PX with Ubuntu 10.10 from 1 June as one that will "make it one of the most user-friendly PCs on the market". Asus said that "many more" Eee PC models running Ubuntu will be available later this year. Linux fans will hope that in the three years since Asus started shipping Linux on its Eee PCs users will have realised that Linux is far more lightweight and suited to netbook computing than Windows.

A new "point release" of Icaros Desktop, distribution of the AROS Research Operating system (an effort to re-create the original AmigaOS in a open source fashion, that may be ported on any platform), has been released today. The new version includes new software and games, but also enhances and extends some of the goods already included in the former releases.

Four years ago, July 2007, Microsoft released the first few tidbits of information about Windows 7. Vista had just been shipped, and it wasn't received well - both by critics and the marketplace. During these days, I argued that for Windows 7, Microsoft ought to scrap the Vista userland, and build an entirely new interface and userland on top of Windows NT, while maintaining a 'classic' Windows version on the side for business and other reluctant folk who want to see the 'new' Windows mature a little bit first. While they didn't do this with Windows 7, they are doing exactly this with Windows 8. Ladies and gentlemen, Windows 8 is the first 'cut the legacy'-release we've all been waiting for - and Microsoft couldn't have picked a better time.