InfoWorld's Paul Venezia serves up six real-world tales of IT stunts and solutions that required a touch of inspired insanity to pull off, proving once again that knowing when to throw out the manual and do something borderline irresponsible is essential to day-to-day IT work. "It could be server on the brink of shutting down all operations, a hard drive that won't power up vital data, or a disgruntled ex-employee who's hidden vital system passwords on the network. Just when all seems lost, it's time to get creative and don your IT daredevil cap, then fire up the oven, shove the end of a pencil into the motherboard, or route the whole city network through your laptop to get the job done," Venezia writes.

FreeBSD developer Colin Percival announced on his blog today that FreeBSD 9-CURRENT now runs on Amazon EC2. A number of FreeBSD developers have contributed to this project. "There are some caveats to this. First, at the moment only FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT can run under EC2; I haven't merged bug fixes back to the stable branches. Second, at the moment FreeBSD only runs on t1.micro instances, for reasons I can't discuss (NDA) but hope will be resolved soon. Third, this code hasn't received very much testing and is almost certain to have more serious bugs, so it should be approached as an experimental, not-ready-for-production-use system for now. "

For a number of days the websites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and others wre attacked by a group of WikiLeaks supporters ('hacktivists'). Although the group calls itself 'Anonymous', researchers at the DACS group of the University of Twente (UT), the Netherlands, discovered that these hacktivists are easily traceable, and therefore anything but anonymous.

Paul Allen's patent infringement complaint against the world and its dog has been dismissed. The court agreed with Google et al that it "lacks adequate factual detail to satisfy the dictates of Twombly and Iqbal" and also "fails to provide sufficient factual detail as suggested by Form 18". The court doesn't agree with Allen's Interval Licensing that the two cases do not apply to patent complaints, but it doesn't even need to go there: "The Court does not find it necessary to determine whether Form 18 is no longer adequate under Twombly and Iqbal because Plaintiff's complaint fails to satisfy either the Supreme Court's interpretation of Rule 8 or Form 18."

The Notion Ink Adam tablet thing, my nominee for the vapourware of the year award, is finally taking pre-orders, but isn't giving out a shipping date. For what it's worth, I'm in love with the interface screenshots (a custom one on top of Android 2.3). In all, I'll believe it when I see it.

Yet another possible change in Ubuntu's core components: they're mulling over replacing GDM with LightDM. Why? Well: "Faster - the greeter doesn't require an entire GNOME session to run. More flexible - multiple greeters are supported through a well defined interface. This allows Ubuntu derivatives to use the same display manager (e.g. Kubuntu, Lubuntu etc.). Simpler codebase - similar feature set in ~5000 lines of code compared to 50000 in GDM. Supports more usecases - first class support for XDMCP and multihead."

The CMS that builds the Syllable websites was used on Syllable Server so far, but has now been ported to Syllable Desktop. This was done by porting it to REBOL 3. This screenshot shows Desktop building its own website in static batch mode and synchronising it with Amazon S3. This screenshot shows the Webster browser previewing the built site as local files. Building the websites on Syllable Server is around 35% faster with REBOL 3 than with REBOL 2. A few longstanding problems in the Russian website and Syllable documentation were fixed because REBOL 3 now understands Unicode.

I know that there's a number of readers who don't like it when OSnews covers political topics, I'm one of them. These political upheavals however spell danger for operating system hobbyists and so I dedicate this article to framing the political news within the context of what we are here to read about: operating systems.

Amidst all the WikiLeaks hoopla, there's also actual regular news going on. Windows 7 is barely out the door, and we're already dealing with Windows 8, which is indeed being worked on but will not arrive for at least two years. There's some rumours from an Italian website which state that the 64bit version of Windows 8 will have a completely new interface called Wind. Right.

An arrest has been made in the case of the DDoS attacks against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and others. The Dutch police has arrested a Dutch guy who has already confessed to taking part in the attacks. Most likely, he is not in any way the brains behind the operation, and I'm going out on a limb here stating that these attacks will continue nonetheless. Also, I'm not the guy. Also also, I'm wondering if there's police anywhere looking for the people who are continuously DDoS'ing WikiLeaks.

"The Singularity project (an OS written in managed code used for research purposes) has provided several very useful research results and opened new avenues for exploration in operating system design. Recently, MSR released a paper covering an operating system research project that takes a new approach to building an OS stack with verifiable and type safe managed code. This project employs a novel use of Typed Assembly Language, which is what you think it is: Assembly with types (implemented as annotations and verified statically using the verification technology Boogie and the theorem prover Z3 (Boogie generates verification conditions that are then statically proven by Z3. Boogie is also a language used to build program verifiers for other languages)). As with Singularity, the C# Bartok compiler is used, but this time it generates TAL. The entire OS stack is verifiably type safe (the Nucleus is essentially the Verve HAL) and all objects are garbage collected. It does not employ the SIP model of process isolation (like Singularity). In this case, again, the entire operating system is type safe and statically proven as such using world-class theorem provers." Channel9 has an interview on video with one of the developers behind this MSR project. Source code to Verve is available.

"At D:Dive Into Mobile this evening, Waterloo's outspoken co-CEO went on record that they'll be taking the PlayBook's QNX platform to smartphones just 'as soon as dual core baseband CPUs', though power consumption remains a limiting factor. At any rate, RIM seems to be fully acknowledging now both that QNX is a little too beefy for today's smartphones and that BlackBerry OS isn't quite beefy enough, which leaves these guys in a bit of a pinch until the dual-core revolution takes hold." It's clear QNX isn't Engadget's forte (I don't blame them - I know jack-all about gadgets compared to them), but of course, we know better. QNX itself will happily run on current-gen mobile phones; heck, even a simple PII will do the job. The problem here is most likely BlackBerry's own userland.

The Document Foundation has announced that the software development project recently announced by BrOffice will contribute to the development of LibreOffice and other free software projects. BrOffice has 15 million users in Brazil.

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner launches the first in a series of articles on browser implementations of HTML5 capabilities. Focusing this round on the presentation layer, Wayner provides an overview of how Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari stand on HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, SVG, and WebGL, providing developers with tips, samples, and resources for making the most of today's HTML5 presentation layer technologies on today's browsers.