The name Fabrice Bellard may not be recognizable to a lot of people, but the work he carries out as a programmer and computer scientist is. . . . He is a very talented programmer, and his latest project demonstrates once again just how talented he is. Using the super-fast JavaScript engines that now come as standard in popular web browsers, he has managed to create a PC emulator that runs in a browser. As a demonstration he has posted a link to a version of the Linux kernel running in such a scenario.

Microsoft published volume 10 of the its Security Intelligence Report which provides perspectives on software vulnerabilities, software vulnerability exploits, malicious and potentially unwanted software, and security breaches in both Microsoft and third party software. Microsoft found out that vulnerabilities in applications versus operating systems or web browsers continued to account for a large majority of all vulnerabilities in 2010, although the total number of application vulnerabilities declined 22.2 percent from 2009. The exploitation of Java vulnerabilities sharply increased in the second quarter of 2010 and surpassed every other exploitation category that the MMPC tracks, including generic HTML/scripting exploits, operating system exploits, and document exploits.

Now that the Playstation Network is back online, the great downplaying by Sony has begun. Sony CEO Howard Stringer has been making the rounds in the media world, talking about the massive security fail, and in his eyes, it's not that big of a deal. He calls it a 'hiccup', something that happens to all large networks.

"The French government's 'three strikes' approach to online copyright infringement relies on a private company that scans file-sharing networks and gathers the IP addresses of alleged Gallic content pirates. But that company, TMG, suffered an embarrassing security breach last week, and the French government has 'temporarily suspended' its acquisition of new TMG data while an investigation is underway." Yeah, the company that collects IP addresses of alleged file shares got Sony'd.

Two weeks ago we covered the news that the Mono development team were let go kicked out by the new owners of Novel, Attachmate, apparently to move operations to Germany. Miguel de Icazza, founder of Mono, has taken this opportunity to break off on his own and has started a new company, Xamarin, to bring commercial .NET development products to iOS and Android.

This is certainly worth a meagre +1 in my book: patent troll Lodsys has actually taken the time to answer some of the concerns on the web regarding its legal threats to several small-time iOS developers. There's some interesting stuff in there.

How can you run a full range of current applications on older computers, netbooks, thin clients, and mobile devices? One way is to install a lightweight Linux like Puppy, Lubuntu, or Vector Light. Select the distro with the apps that meets your needs while matching your computer's resources.

"Google Chrome OS is designed around the concept of "expendable" terminals that you can lose, drop or simply throw away without fear of losing your data, which is safely stored into the cloud. thing is certain, with all your data being available into the cloud, in one place, available 24/7 through a fast internet link, this will be a goldmine for cybercriminals. All that is necessary here is to get hold of the authentication tokens required to access the cloud account."

Linux currently powers a majority of the world’s web servers and supercomputers. As a desktop OS, however, Linux has yet to gain mainstream acceptance. That said, there are some countries where people have embraced Linux on the desktop to a greater degree than most.

In the past 10 years VMware has executed a remarkable strategy to topple enterprise software incumbents and emerge as an ecosystem kingpin. More recently, the company has plunged head first into cloud computing from infrastructure to applications. Time and again, it seems as though VMware is beating Microsoft at its own game. But a look deeper reveals that is no surprise.

Cheap routers sometimes lack a bit in functionality. Maybe you wish yours did VPN, had a guest network for relatives passing by, or supported IPv6. In most case, the hardware supports it, and all it takes to get these options is to install an alternative third-party firmware. Such firmwares also are frequently more reliable and faster than vendor-provided ones. So why not give them a try?

"Both hardware- and software-wise, are nothing special: You can download Chrome OS's open source brother, Chromium OS, for free -- and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering. In fact, for around $300 you can get a cheaper and more powerful netbook with Windows 7 pre-installed -- and it only takes about 30 minutes to wipe Windows and install Chrome OS yourself."

Patent trolls are evil. However, we're used to patent trolls attacking big companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, who themselves keep the broken patent system intact - so it's kind of what goes around comes around; schadenfreude if you will. However, what if a patent troll carefully threatens to sue a number of smal-time iOS developers, knowing full well that these small developers cannot fight back due to the iOS developer agreement? What kind of low-point have we hit then?

"A new bill backed by movie studios and other large copyright holders takes a novel approach to curbing access to piratical Web sites: an Internet death penalty. That's a good way to describe the approach adopted by the legislation introduced today, which specifies a step-by-step method for making Web sites suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks vanish from the Internet. It's called the Protect IP Act. The U.S. Department of Justice would receive the power to seek a court order against an allegedly infringing Web site, and then serve that order on search engines, certain Domain Name System providers, and Internet advertising firms - which would in turn be required to 'expeditiously' make the target Web site invisible." ...because the interests of big content are obviously far more important than socialist communist terrorist nonsense like freedom of speech, right to a fair trial, innocent until proven otherwise, and so on. This is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. Honest.