"Florian Mueller has been killing it these past few months with his analysis of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog, and today he's unearthed a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java." Update: ZDNet provides some compelling evidence that it's not so.

"We've seen IBM and ARM team up before, but this week both companies announced a new joint initiative to develop 14nm chip processing technology. That's significantly smaller than the 20nm SoC technology ARM hopes to create in partnership with TSMC, and makes the company's previous work with IBM on 32nm semiconductors look like a cake walk."

"The Zeus malware continues to evolve, diversifying away from its target bank sites and their customers, and over to sites with user credentials that allow assets that have a financial value."

"Microsoft quietly announced this week that it has released betas of three updated security testing tools , targeting security professionals and ISVs in an attempt to encourage development of less vulnerable software."

"The GNOME Project launches the new GNOME 3 website that brings you all the latest news about the new desktop of the same name. The new GNOME 3 website walks the curious as well as the new and seasoned GNOME user through all that the new GNOME 3 desktop is."

"Tim Cook, the acting CEO for Apple, confirmed yesterday that the company will be spending nearly four billion dollars over the next 24 months in what it calls long term component contracts - and we believe that Apple might be on the verge of bringing back Project Aquarius."

The fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice is going to have its first official release soon. This version is primarily a code cleanup, and so it will not be much different to OpenOffice 3.3, which is also about to be released soon. For the subsequent release of LibrOffice, however, there are proposals starting to emerge which are quite interesting. Tech Drive-in reports on a mock-up of a proposed overhaul of the LibreOffice UI.

This looks really strange, but it seems there's now a project to convert x86-64 processors into working as 32-bit! The author of this post claims that on x86-64 programs claim too much memory and they can work more efficiently by going back to 32-bit.

What would have happened if the ST had run a BSD based UNIX rather than TOS and GEM? "To run Unix effectively we needed some hardware that was very fast, that was simple enough to put into a minor spin of the ST’s memory controller with little project risk, and that would still provide some kind of memory relocation and protection. The ability to have separate address spaces to isolate processes would be good, too."

Codezero Embedded Hypervisor Toolkit v0.4.1 has been released for TI OMAP4 dual-core Cortex-A9 Pandaboard platform. Please take a look at the download page for the project installer and tarball packages. Available in this release is a prebuilt hypervisor toolkit for userspace application development. The toolkit brings up two cores as a real-time executive and is meant for running baremetal software on the low cost OMAP4 ARM Cortex-A9 hardware from TI. Virtualized Android and Linux editions are also planned for a later release.

The Free Software Foundation announced today that it will be supporting the WebM project. As Brett Smith, license compliance engineer for the FSF, said in a press release: "Google has been working to bring together a broad coalition of organizations to support WebM, which will go far to help it become the video codec of choice with HTML5. e want the world to know that we also support WebM: with its developer-friendly patent license and free software reference implementation, it's a good choice to help ensure the Web fulfills its promise of providing a free way for the world to communicate."

When we reported on the release of Xfce 4.8, we ignored a statement inside the release announcement about the lack of new features coming to the BSD world. The statement was a bit disconnected from the rest of the press release, but Xfce developer Jannis Pohlmann has published a blog post giving a few more details about the issue.

"Apple sold 4.13 million Macs during the quarter, a 23 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 16.24 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 86 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 19.45 million iPods during the quarter, representing a seven percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company also sold 7.33 million iPads during the quarter."

"Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, hinted that Microsoft is trying to unify their operating systems into one OS that runs from phone to the desktop, his remark raising questions on Windows and Windows Phone 7's future." Obviously, the Windows Phone 7 userland probably runs just as fine on Windows NT as it does on Windows CE, so I honestly don't get the issue here.