Finally! After pioneering sandboxing of Javascript and tabs in the browser, Chrome is now finally busy moving Flash into a sandbox. Windows users of the dev channel have been fed the new release with Flash sandboxing already.

And so the Wikileaks saga continues - with politics once again crossing with the technology side of things. After several DDoS attacks on Wikileaks' website, the organisation decided to move their website over to Amazon's cloud service yesterday. Today, Amazon kicked Wikileaks out of its cloud after being pressured by US Congress. Update: In a Q&A on the Guardian website, Julian Assange drops the bomb--Amazon failed the test: "Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases.". Stunning.

Now this is interesting. My brand-new MacBook Air 11.6" is at my local Apple retailer because either the SATA part of the logic board or the SSD died mysteriously, and here we have Apple blocking PhotoFast from selling their faster, more spacious replacement drives.

Splashtop has released a new version of its instant-on OS that is based on the Chromium browser and could shorten PC boot times to just a few seconds. The latest version of the Splashtop OS, now in beta, is a lightweight version of Linux that allows users to surf the Web, access online applications or check e-mail almost instantly after switching on a PC.

The version 10.11 of the Genode OS construction framework has been released. Driven by the requirements for the recently published Live CD, the new version features an execution environment for drivers of the gPXE project, an on-demand-paged ISO9660 file system, alpha-blending support for the GUI server, a new virtual network bridge, and a http-based block driver. Enjoy the release notes for the full story.

The Pirate Bay trial may currently not be going alright, but Peter Sunde, Swedish co-founder of The Pirate Bay, is already working on his next project. Surely spurred by the recent seizures of domains by Big Content the US government, Sunde has unveiled he's working on an open, distributed alternative to ICANN's root server.

"Microsoft is one of the big stock-market success stories - or at least it used to be. The company has got thousands of people rich, through employee stock options or just through smart investing. But with stock under $30, the same place it was 10 years ago, what if Microsoft went private? That was the question posed this morning by Seattle Times columnist Brier Dudley. 'Sure, in the back of people's minds. We've thought about it,' Bill Koefoed, Microsoft's general manager of investor relations, told the Seattle Times."

NTFS is the file system used by Windows. It is a powerful and complicated file system. There are few file systems that provide as many features and to fully cover them all would require a book. And in fact there is a book detailing NTFS, and it's already out of date. The purpose of this article is not to cover all of the features of NTFS, nor will it exhaustively cover NTFS features in detail. Instead we will cover its basic structure and then describe some of its more advanced features and provide use examples where possible. We will focus more on what it does, rather than how it does it. Trying to walk the line between informative and detailed is difficult and so this article contains a lot of references for people who hunger for more detail.

The US is really ramping up its war on intellectual property infringement, a war which I'm sure will be just as successful, cheap and supported by the people as the wars on drugs and terrorism. The US has started seizing the domain names of various websites through ICANN - not because owners of these sites were convicted of anything, but merely because complaints have been filed against them. Anyone want to take a guess how long it will be before the US government blocks WikiLeaks? Update: The blocks function outside of the US too. In other words, the US is forcing its views upon the rest of the world once again.

"Three of the admins behind The Pirate Bay are all still guilty, a Swedish appeals court decided on Friday, but their jail time has been reduced. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom's prison sentences have all been reduced from the original one year to between 4 and 10 months each, though the trade-off is an increase in damages that they must pay to the music and movie industries."

The new version 3 of the REBOL programming language supports extensions written in other languages. Extensions are implemented on top of the modules framework, which is also new. Extensions can be separate dynamically loaded libraries, or they can be embedded in the REBOL executable. In fact, REBOL 3 is now highly modularised: a number of its subsystems are embedded modules, and subsystems written in C and C++ are embedded extensions. Those modules and extensions are part of the open host kit, so that custom collections can be compiled into REBOL executables.

"KDE releases 4.6 beta1 of Workspaces, Applications and Development Frameworks, bringing significant improvements to desktop search, a revamped activity system and a significant performance boost to window management and desktop effects. Efforts all across the KDE codebase pay off by making KDE's frameworks more suitable for usage on all devices. The release provides a testing base for a stable release in January 2011."

I don't really know what Sony wants with this, but they're using GNUstep, so that's something, I guess. "Sony's Networked Application Platform is a project designed to leverage the open source community to build and evolve the next generation application framework for consumer electronic devices. The developer program gives access to a developer community and resources like SDK, tools, documentation and other developers. The foundation upon which this project is base comes from the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.). While Apple has continued to update their specification in the form of Cocoa and Mac OS X, the GNUstep branch of the tree has diverged considerably."

Good news: the UNIX copyrights owned by Novell will not fall in the hands of Microsoft as part of the IP purchase by Redmond. "Novell will continue to own Novell's UNIX copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate," states John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer at Novell. Yeppers.