In order to celebrate the release of Pardus 2011, here's a review of it by LinuxUser, which quickly shows the small touches and attention to details which make this Turkish distribution so special and explains what's new in this release.

"Scientists from Oxford University have made a significant step towards an ultrafast quantum computer by successfully generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon for the first time -- entanglement is the key ingredient that promises to make quantum computers far more powerful than conventional computing devices."

Richard Hillesley has written about the fate of various Sun open source projects since that firm's acquisition by Oracle. He noticeably quotes Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as having said "If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it."

After the infamous announcement by one of Motorola's YouTube channel moderators that those wanting custom ROMs should "buy elsewhere", it seems that Motorola's PR department has taken control back: "We apologize for the feedback we provided regarding our bootloader policy. The response does not reflect the views of Motorola. We are working closely with our partners to offer a bootloader solution that will enable developers to use our devices as a development platform while still protecting our users' interests. More detailed information will follow as we get closer to availability."

"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."

"In 2010, exploited Java vulnerabilities outpaced the exploit of Adobe Reader and Acrobat," Landesman, senior security researcher at Cisco, said. "Java was 3.5 times more frequently exploited than were malicious PDFs. That really spells out the need for paying attention to what's making the headlines but also paying attention to the types of things that aren't making the headlines."

"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 major U.S. wireless carriers now all have services that, while not 4G under the strictest definition, provide broadband-level speeds without wires. So why not cut the cord entirely and have one broadband connection wherever you go? Here's a look at where 4G coverage is available, what real-world connectivity is like, and how much it will cost you.

"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."

"Opera has officially announced its much-loved web browser will be appearing on Sony TVs and Blu-ray players . There's no specific details, but it given its low-key presence at CES a few weeks ago (Sony Insider grabbed a video of it in action on the show floor -- embedded after the break -- unfortunately hampered by slow connection speeds) it will spread at least across the company's 22 new connected HDTVs."

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.

In a major cybercrime turning point, scammers have begun shifting their focus away from Windows-based PCs to other operating systems and platforms, including smart phones, tablet computers, and mobile platforms in general, according to the a new Cisco report. The report also finds that 2010 was the first year in the history of the Internet that spam volume decreased, that cybercriminals are investing heavily in "money muling," and that users continue to fall prey to myriad forms of trust exploitation.

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 target of attacks has shifted from traditional infrastructure to mobile users and endpoint devices. As the security of mobile networks has improved, mobile devices are increasingly the target of attacks, while social networking sites are quickly becoming cybercriminals' platform of choice to expand and propagate destructive botnets. Anti-virus software is losing the battle against malware - the new breed of malware is virtually undetectable by current scanning software.