The newest member of Kingston's performance memory series is the HyperX H2O. As you can probably guess from the name these DDR3 memory modules are liquid-cooled, with the line running along the top of the heatsink. The kits will come in dual- and triple-channel varieties in 4GB and 6GB capacities. The 2×2GB kits come in frequencies of 2000MHz or 2133MHz.

An emergency out-of-band update for patching the critical LNK vulnerability has been released by Microsoft. "The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code may be executed when the operating system displays the icon of a malicious shortcut file," it says in the security bulletin.

Measures to support the power saving mechanisms of AMD graphics chips, network code optimizations for multi-core processors, features for de-fragmenting the working memory and an improved support of the power management and turbo features offered by modern processors are among the highlights of the new kernel version. After a development time of almost two-and-a-half months, Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.35 of the Linux kernel.

A recent vague announcement on osol-announce hints that something big is rumbling for OpenSolaris: "A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we're just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public." They have a website, and they're going to be hosting a conference call on August 3.

KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly (August 4th, 2010), roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals. The critical shift KDE SC took in this series is abstracting the desktop from the underlying system through three pillars, phonon, plasma and solid making the desktop some sort of a virtual platform environment and easily portable to other operating systems.

A few years ago, there was a website called Jailbreakme.com that enabled you to jailbreak your iPhone without iTunes, by just visiting a web site. But it stopped working with one of the OS updates, so people forgot about it. Well, it's back. I've actually been waiting to jailbreak my new iPhone 4 and for an iOS 4 jailbreak for my old iPhone 3GS, but after fiddling around with downloading big ipsw files from sketchy websites only to find they didn't work, I decided to wait for an easier option.

Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.

A provocative editorial at The Register makes this suggestion: "Microsoft should consider acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile. Novell has a seat at the Linux Foundation's MeeGo table, and Microsoft should embrace that operating system rather than its myriad (but universally unsuccessful) mobile variants of Windows."

Up to 4.6 million users of the Android smartphone operating system have downloaded a suspicious wallpaper app that collects and transmits user data to a site in China, mobile security firm Lookout has warned.

Microsoft has released a free tool to bring newer security protections to older platforms and applications. The enhanced mitigation experience tookit (EMET) was announced at the BlackHat USA 2010 security conference in Las Vegas. EMET will be available from August and is designed to help block targeted attacks against unpatched vulnerabilities in platforms such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft had its annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday, and Steve Ballmer answered questions about what the company's answer to the iPad was going to be, and whether Windows Phone 7 was going to be a part of that product strategy. He said, "We're coming . . . We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows." Ballmer and Microsoft so don't get it. I can't believe Steve Ballmer is making me feel sorry for Microsoft.

Several talks at the Black Hat security conference this week in Las Vegas will focus on tools that could make software safer by automatically searching for bugs--and pinpointing the ones that could be most dangerous.

Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement "demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness," company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement.

KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7.According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers.Read more here