Fantastic expose about Flash and HTML5 video by lead x264 developer Jason Garrett-Glaser. "The internet has been filled for quite some time with an enormous number of blog posts complaining about how Flash sucks - so much that it's sounding as if the entire internet is crying wolf. But, of course, despite the incessant complaining, they're right: Flash has terrible performance on anything other than Windows x86 and Adobe doesn't seem to care at all. But rather than repeat this ad nauseum, let’s be a bit more intellectual and try to figure out what happened."

"The dragonegg GCC plugin can host itself! Dragonegg lets you use the LLVM optimizers with GCC-4.5, much like llvm-gcc, but unlike llvm-gcc does not involve modifying GCC, thanks to the new GCC plugin infrastructure (currently one small patch is required). We built all of GCC-4.5, LLVM and dragonegg with dragonegg, then used the resulting binaries to build them all again. Why? Because we love to build! And because this was a great way of checking that nothing was miscompiled. The final dragonegg plugin was fully functional, successfully passing the entire dragonegg test suite."

"With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec - VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash)."

Ah, how we Europeans get to sit back and relax whenever some company invokes the DMCA - a law we don't have over here. Sadly, that sentence has to be amended with the following word: yet. We don't have the DMCA yet, but it the ACTA is accepted, we Europeans - and the rest of the world - can no longer sit back and relax: the US is hard at work imposing the DMCA upon the nation of Foreign.

Discovered by Czech researchers, the Chuck Norris botnet has been spreading by taking advantage of poorly configured routers and DSL modems. The malware got the Chuck Norris moniker from a programmer's Italian comment in its source code: 'in nome di Chuck Norris', which means 'in the name of Chuck Norris'. Chuck Norris is unusual in that it infects DSL modems and routers rather than PCs. It installs itself on routers and modems by guessing default administrative passwords and taking advantage of the fact that many devices are configured to allow remote access. They're behind the times, though. It should've been the Epic Beard Man Botnet. Move over, Chuck.

Why was it not FreeBSD but Linux that became the most popular open source Unix-like operating system? Richard Hillesley traces the history of FreeBSD and examines how FreeBSD, and Linux, their different cultures and preferred licenses affected the open source world. "The BSD hackers have an aphorism that speaks some truths, which says: 'BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.' This aphorism speaks of a difference in the cultures that is greater than the words contained within it."

While it's been a low-level grumbling for years, the issue of Flash on mobile devices (and particularly the iPhone/Touch/iPad ecosystem) has reached fever pitch over the past few weeks, with Steve Jobs as self-appointed Flash basher-in-Chief. The OSNews crowd, that is, dyed-in-the-wool technologists have, by and large, not been big fans of Flash, with its spotty availability and performance on alternative platforms, resource hogging, and instability. And though it's quite useful for web video and other specialized interfaces, it drives the tech savvy crazy when it's used for utterly superfluous multimedia bling. So we've had a lively discussion of the pros and cons of Flash, and whether device users should be free to make their own decision about whether it's worthy to install on their iPads. But we're leaving out an important detail. As Daniel Eran Dilger, a Flash developer, points out, almost all the important existing Flash infrastructure won't work anyway. Update: A worthwhile rebuttal to this point of view.

Sigh. So, we have the music industry whose DRM schemes and other anti-piracy measures have thoroughly failed, and are only hindering consumers who stick to the letter of the law. Now we have Hollywood who's going to do it all over again: the AACS LA is busy killing off component video - even for existing, currently-owned equipment.

In case you've been living under a rock: Apple isn't particularly keen on Flash. They can't control it, and the company claims it's the number one cause of crashes on Mac OS X. Now that Steve Jobs is busy promoting the iPad to content providers, he's also on the offensive against Flash.

Be prepared for choice to be thrust before you, the Microsoft browser ballot arrives in Europe around the 1st of March. It will also be available in Windows Update as an optional install for interested users to test next week. Microsoft have included screenshots of the process. Via BBC News

BBC News reports that the US and European regulators (yes, the same EC that slapped MS with a EUR900M fine) have approved the deal that will see Microsoft control Yahoo's search and advertising business. This will mean that one of the first, great search engines (there was a time before Google) will now be powered by johnny-come-lately Bing.

A mobile operating system release by Microsoft that's worth rumouring about, and that actually gets people excited. Yes, it's been a long time, but here we are. A number of Windows Phone 7 Series developer documents have supposedly leaked, which provide answers to some of the question we have - including the multitasking thing.

IPfaces is a client-server framework for iPhone (and presumably other platforms soon) that enables developers to create a server-side app using their familiar tools then connect to a generic client that's already downloadable in the App Store. It's dual license, with a GPL Open Source version for free projects and a commercial version for for-profit apps. Unlike other frameworks that allow you to create an iPhone app using non Objective-C tools, this one gives you a real client, not just a wrapper for a web app.

"NEC Corporation and NEC Electronics Corporation announced today the development and successful demonstration of LSI technology for next-generation high-speed serial communication interfaces. This new technology allows inter-chip communication that is three times faster than modern communication interface standards, such as USB 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0, without using complicated transmission modes like multilevel transmission."