Hearkening back to the Sony Rootkit brouhaha from a few years ago, a security researcher is claiming in a Network World article that he detected factory-installed keyloggers in two brand new Samsung Laptops. Samsung has made no official response, but a tech support supervisor contacted by the author said that the keystroke logging software was installed by Samsung to "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the "GM1" release . . . That would still mean an early Summer release - and potentially one before Summer technically even begins. After all, early June would line up nicely with the June 5 to 9 timeframe that Apple's WWDC event is likely to take place this year.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now run their cloud applications on hardware dedicated to them. Amazon's EC2 uses virtualization, based on a customized version of the Xen hypervisor, to run multiple OSes and customers on a single physical machine. However, that way of running an IT infrastructure isn't a good fit for all users as some have regulatory or other restrictions that require physical isolation, according to an Amazon." Also: "Oh snap! Look who just ate Apple and Google's lunch here? Minutes ago, Amazon rolled out its very own music streaming service which is conveniently dubbed the Amazon Cloud Player."

"Version 4.6 of GCC was released over the weekend with a multitude of improvements and version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is due out in early April with its share of improvements. How though do these two leading open-source compilers compare? In this article we are providing benchmarks of GCC 4.5.2, GCC 4.6.0, DragonEgg with LLVM 2.9, and Clang with LLVM 2.9 across five distinct AMD/Intel systems to see how the compiler performance compares."

The C++ programming language is about to be updated, as the ISO steering committee for the language has approved the final draft specifying its next version. The ISO/IEC Information Technology Task Force will review the steering committee's Final Draft International Standard will review and, barring any complications, publish the draft later this year. It will be known as C++ 2011.

I'm still reeling from the unrivalled epicness and awesomeness that is Sucker Punch in IMAX (just got home - do not miss this film), but now I'm back to boring old reality where we apparently care about pieces of plastic that go beep. So, anywho. The deal between Nokia and Microsoft has many Symbian and Qt developers worry about the future of their platforms. To address these concerns, Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia, has published an open letter describing Nokia's plans for Symbian, Qt, and Java for Series 40 devices. While the letter doesn't deliver any hard dates, the transition phase to Windows Phone 7 is set to 2011/2012.

The ReactOS team has released ReactOS 0.3.13. "This version continues building on the work first previewed in 0.3.12, ranging from memory management improvements to better sound and display control. A Coverity scan also occurred between 0.3.12 and 0.3.13, helping the team clean up potential security holes and also help improve general stability by enforcing more care in memory operations." The detailed 0.3.13 changelog is also available.

HelenOS is a modern microkernel-based multiserver operating system running on a large variety of processor architectures. Version 0.4.3 thereof has been just released. The new release fixes many bugs and brings a lot of improvements in areas so diverse such as new hardware platform support, userspace device driver framework, device drivers, observability and robustness, programming languages, file systems and networking. For the complete list of user-visible changes, see the release notes. The released files can be downloaded from the project's download page.

When you run smbd -V on your Snow Leopard installation, you'll see it's running SAMBA version 3.0.28a-apple. While I'm not sure how much difference the "-apple" makes, version 3.0.28a is old. Very old. In other words, it's riddled with bugs. Apple hasn't updated SAMBA in 3 years, and for Lion, they're dumping it altogether for something homegrown. The reason? SAMBA is now GPLv3.

"The International Trade Commission has ruled in favor of Apple in one of the company's patent disputes with Nokia. ITC Judge E. James Gildea said on Friday that Apple did not violate any of Nokia's five mobile device patents, though the Commission's members must first review the decision before taking any further action." In the vice-versa case, ITC staff sided with Nokia (i.e., Nokia does not violate Apple's patents either).

The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo TV working group ,the goal of which is to "help drive the evolution of MeeGo within the television ecosystem and provide an open framework for industry creativity and innovation".

The company revealed Thursday that it will delay publication of the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) source code for the foreseeable future - possibly for months. It's not clear when (or if) the source code will be made available. The decision puts Android on a path towards a "draconian future" of its own, in which it is controlled by a single vendor - Google. The Ars link linked above is a pretty inflammatory editorial, so see also: Businessweek, GigaOM, The Register.

Yesterday, we linked to a story about the most recent allegations Sony made against George 'GeoHot' Hotz in their ongoing court case. Supposedly, Hotz has sabotaged the hardware he had to hand over, and he had fled the country to further stifle the court case, among other things. Hotz' lawyer, as well as Hotz himself, have responded to these allegations. The gist? They're all nonsense.

Ten years ago, to the day. March 24, 2001, the first official released version of Mac OS X went on sale, for USD 129. It was a massive step up and a massive step down from MacOS 9 at the same time - technically way more advanced, but clearly still in its infancy and pretty much unusable. Kernel panics, crashes, incredibly slow, and lacking many key features. It was so bad, in fact, that Mac OS X 10.1 was released as a free upgrade. Of course, we geeks know that Mac OS X is technically a lot older, but alas, let's just celebrate these 10 years. Maybe Lion will finally bring a usable non-crashing Finder!