RSA Breach: Reactions from the Security Community

Privacy, Security 16 Comments
RSA suffered a breach and data loss following an "extremely sophisticated cyber attack." Their investigation revealed that the information extracted from the company systems is related to its SecurID two-factor authentication products. The news of the incident spread through the community like wildfire and information security professionals are offering their take on this incident. We still don't know the technical details, but it's certain that RSA's brand has taken a big hit.
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Wave 533 and bada Review 2: Booting bada, Overall UI

Wireless 12 Comments
Having reviewed the Wave 533's hardware in the last article, it's now time for us to have a look at the most interesting part: the bada OS itself. In this article, I'll have a look at the boot procedure of bada (how long it takes, what happens on first boot), and then will discuss the app-independent UI concepts introduced by Samsung in this OS before going in more details about specific apps in upcoming articles.
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Z-410: How ZFS Is Slowly Making Its Way to Mac OS X

macOS 31 Comments
"A commercial ZFS solution is (still) coming to Mac OS X, thanks to former Apple filesystem and OS engineer Don Brady (who previously worked on the abandoned internal Apple project to port ZFS). Brady and his company, Ten's Complement, just launched a limited private beta in hopes to have the software polished and ready for a summer launch this year. Ars spoke with Brady, who has a long history engineering filesystems for Mac OS and Mac OS X, to find out a little about his previous work with ZFS at Apple, and what Mac users can expect to gain from Ten's Complement's port of ZFS."
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Mac Marketshare Broken Down by Country

Apple 12 Comments
Switzerland has the highest percentage of Mac users than any other with a 17.61% share. Luxembourg comes in second with a 15.79% share while the US occupies the third slot with a 15.36% share. Countries that just missed the top 10 include the UK, Japan, and France. Interestingly, Nordic countries seem to love their Macs as all five of them (Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) all made the top 20.
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MonoMac 1.0 Released

.NET 19 Comments
From the release announcement: "Almost a year ago we started building a set of Mono bindings for building native MacOS X applications. Our original goals were modest: bind enough of AppKit that you could build native desktop applications for OSX using C# or your favorite .NET language. We leveraged a lot of the code that we built for MonoTouch our binding to the CocoaTouch APIs."
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IE9 Subject to Old, Unpatched IE Vulnerability

  Submitted by Petur Internet Explorer 7 Comments
Microsoft has confirmed that an old known vulnerability has struck their newest version of their browser, Internet Explorer 9. According to Microsoft: "Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in all supported editions of Microsoft Windows. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to cause a victim to run malicious scripts when visiting various Web sites, resulting in information disclosure. "
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Graphics-enabled CPUs to take off in 2011

Hardware 8 Comments
Half the notebook computers and a growing number of desktops shipped in 2011 will run on graphics-enabled microprocessors as designers Intel and AMD increase competition for the units that raise multimedia speeds without add-ons. Processors with built-in graphics capabilities will be installed this year on 115 million notebooks, half of total shipments, and 63 million desktop PCs, or 45 percent of the total, according to analysts.
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Debian 6 Squeeze: Not Good

Debian 223 Comments
Writing about Debian is not a simple thing. You know it's the giant that has spawned pretty much every other distro out there. It's almost like a Roman Empire, almost a taboo. Furthermore, it's not a desktop distro per se. It's more sort of a template you use to build your platform. It's also a SOHO server distro, therefore it more fits into the business category, comparable to CentOS and similar.
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Mozilla To release Firefox 4 March 22

Mozilla, Gecko 26 Comments
According to a post on the mozilla.dev.planning Google Group by Mozilla Senior Director of Engineering, Damon Sicore, the ship date for the stable version of Firefox 4, Tuesday 22 March, has been approved by Mozilla's IT and Marketing teams. Sicore notes that, should the developers discover any last-second blocker bugs that would prevent the final release, a second release candidate would be issued "as soon as possible" and the ship date would be reset. So far, the first RC has "received a very warm welcome", said Sicore.
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The Right Office Apps For Android At Work

Wireless 1 Comment
InfoWorld's JR Raphael provides an in-depth comparison of Android productivity suites, including DataViz's Documents to Go, MobiSystems' OfficeSuite Pro, Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite, ThinkFree Office Mobile, and the Google Docs mobile Web app. Each tool is vetted for word processing, spreadsheet editing, and presentation management. Raphael also examines additional tools for accomplishing other basic office tasks, such as dealing with PDFs and Photoshop files, piecing together the best overall package for your Android smartphone at work.
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Don’t Write Off Nokia and Qt Yet

Qt 21 Comments
When Microsoft and Nokia announced Nokia's move to Windows Phone 7, most people assumed the worst for Nokia's stewardship of the open source Qt, and indeed the company quickly sold its Qt licensing interests to Digia. But it looks like the company still has plans for Qt - and for the Symbian OS. Aaron Seigo, a Qt hacker employed by Nokia, told blogger Brian Proffitt that "Nokia is predicting over 150 million Symbian devices still to come" and "I think they've underestimated the longevity of Symbian".
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WebM, H264: Encoder Speed Benchmark

Benchmarks 71 Comments
A comment on the recent article about the Bali release of Googles WebM tools (libvpx) claimed that one of the biggest problems facing the adoption of WebM video was the slow speed of the encoder as compared to x264. This article sets out to benchmark the encoder against x264 to see if this is indeed true and if so, how significant the speed difference really is.
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Linux 2.6.38 Released

Linux 9 Comments
Linux 2.6.38 has been released. This release includes support for a automatic process grouping ("the patch that does wonders" ), significant scalability improvements in the VFS, Btrfs LZO compression and read-only snapshots, support for the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol (which helps to provide network connectivity in the presence of natural disasters, military conflicts or Internet censorship), transparent Huge Page support (without using hugetblfs), support for the AMD Fusion APUs, many drivers and other changes. You can read the full changelog as well.
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