Looks like Apple might have changed their mind and rushed a security update against Mac Defender a bit too quickly. "Hours after Apple released update and the initial set of definitions, a new variation of Mac Defender is in the wild. This one has a new name, Mdinstall.pkg, and it has been specifically formulated to skate past Apple's malware-blocking code." Update: And one day later, Apple has updated its malware definitions to detect the new version. MD's turn.

It's 2am here (edit: I'm done writing, it's 2:38am now), and I really ought to be sleeping right about now, but for some stupid arbitrary reason, the D9 conference is held at honestly irresponsible hours for us Europeans (and we rock, damnit). So, here I am, MacBook Air on my lap, camomile tea (the Empress of Teas) in my cup, because Microsoft just had to show Windows 8's new interface for the first time at this ungodly hour. Oh, and they unveiled some more interesting stuff about Windows 8. Update: The videos from D9 are up. Mossberg talking to Steve Sinofsky, and the Windows 8 demonstration by Larson-Green.

"Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice."

HP's CEO Leo Aptheker is currently on stage at D9, answering questions from the audience. The thing hasn't concluded yet, but I think this one warrants its own item: Apotheker has revealed that HP is also licensing webOS to other hardware makers. "It's a great OS - why wouldn't we want to offer it to other companies? Why wouldn't they want to use webOS? Appliance makers could use it to connect up normal home devices. We'd like to make webOS available to these people - enterprises, SMBs, etc. Yes, webOS will be more than just a system that runs inside an HP product." When asked more directly if, for instance, HTC could build webOS phones, Apotheker answered: "We'd certainly have that conversation."

Well, I have to say this: Lodsys got some balls. After Apple threatening them with legal action, Lodsys has gone on the offensive, and has proceeded to sue third party iOS application developers. While Lodsys had first given developers 21 days to negotiate an agreement, due to Apple's legal threats, the company has now moved its litigation timing to an earlier date.

As you all know, Microsoft is hard at work making sure Windows 8 runs well on tablets, including a completely new, Windows Phone 7-like Metro user interface. Another similarity between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7, apparently, is that Microsoft will be controlling the hardware experience rather tightly. This all comes from Acer CEO J. T. Wang.

Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu Linux, estimates that the product has over 12 million users worldwide. And why not? Ubuntu is free and it runs more than ten thousand applications. It has a vibrant user community, websites covering everything you might ever need to know, good tutorials, a paid support option, and more. Yet I often hear friends and co-workers casually criticize Ubuntu. Perhaps this the price of success. Or is it? In this article I'll analyze common criticisms and try to sort fact from fiction.

Over the weekend, Yong Zhang (yongzh), developer of emulators for old gaming systems on Android, has seen his developer revoked and all applications removed from the Android Market. While locally installed applications remain on user's device this time, they obviously cannot be updated or reinstalled by users who have legally purchased them. No warning or explanation has been sent, but the app and account removal is most likely the result of a complaint from one of the companies who own the right to those systems, as a complaint from Sega last month resulted in a couple of emulators getting removed already.

It turns out that a lot of people haven't been paying attention. Over the weekend, a story about how Microsoft is earning more from HTC's Android devices than from its own Windows Phone 7 sales spread all across the web, with surprised reactions everywhere. Anyone who has been paying attention to Microsoft's recent patent trolling regarding Android could've seen this coming.

In order to not overwhelm OSNews with even more legal news, I didn't report on the recent developments in Apple v. Samsung until we had some more stuff to consolidate. Well, since the goings been getting good lately there, let's talk about it. Samsung was ordered to hand over a slew of unreleased products and materials to Apple, and now, Samsung, for its part, has demanded that Apple hands over the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 to Samsung. If they exist. This is gettin' good.

It's funny how trying to have a consistent system design makes you constantly jump from one area of the designed OS to another. I initially just tried to implement interrupt handling, and now I'm cleaning up the design of an RPC-based daemon model, which will be used to implement interrupt handlers, along with most other system services. Anyway, now that I get to something I'm personally satisfied with, I wanted to ask everyone who's interested to check that design and tell me if anything in it sounds like a bad idea to them in the short or long run. That's because this is a core part of this OS' design, and I'm really not interested in core design mistakes emerging in a few years if I can fix them now. Many thanks in advance.

Ding ding ding ding - I think we have a record here. Launched yesterday, Google Wallet has already attracted a lawsuit. While patent lawsuits are teh shizzle these days, this lawsuit is a little different, so sadly I can't trot out my usual 'software patents bad' lines (aww). PayPal has sued Google over its Wallet service, claiming that one key former PayPal executive who accepted a job at Google took trade secrets with him.

After having an interesting discussion with Brendan on the topic of deadlocks in threaded and asynchronous event handling systems (see the comments on this blog post), I just had something to ask to the developers on OSnews: could you live without blocking API calls? Could you work with APIs where lengthy tasks like writing to a file, sending a signal, doing network I/O, etc is done in a nonblocking fashion, with only callbacks as a mechanism to return results and notify your software when an operation is done?

Well, this is some good news on this fine morning. After Sony Ericsson announcing official support for bootloader unlocking on their Android phones, HTC has just stepped it up a notch: the company's CEO (no less) has announced on Facebook that going forward, HTC will no longer lock down any of their phones' bootloaders.