Cisco recently announced the finalists in its "Think Inside the Box" Developer Contest. The contest is intended to "promote the concept of the network as a platform" and it's based on the capabilities of the Cisco Integrated Services Router Application Extension Platform (AXP), which is essentially a Linux blade that plugs into the Cisco Integrated Services Router. Teams from all over the world entered the contest, and seemed to really run with the idea of offloading tasks to the network hardware. Read on for our interview with one of the contest's finalists.

Since the early days of the internet, it has fallen under control of ICANN, which in turn was bound by an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. As the internet grew bigger and more pervasive, intentional calls for severing the ties between ICANN and the US government grew stronger. Today, the US has ceded control over ICANN.

Well, this is refreshing. While Richard Stallman is a staunch critic of anything closed and non-Free, his ire seems mostly directed towards DRM and Microsoft. However, a lesser known fact is that he often talks about Apple's Mac OS X too in his speeches. During those speeches, he repeatedly claimed Mac OS X contained a backdoor which allowed Apple to forcibly impose software changes upon users. Stallman has now posted a retraction for those claims.

"ARM comes of age with a major PC design breakthrough this week. The Cambridge-based company will see a microprocessor based on one of its low power cores sitting side-by-side with an Intel Core Duo in a Dell laptop PC. The key to ARM's success is Dell's plan to run Linux as a second rapid boot operating system on its Windows latptop... The high-end laptop called the Latitude Z will use the ARM-based processor to run a second Linux based operating system which will allow the machine to boot up quickly for specific applications such as music and video playing. The PC runs Windows 7 on a 1.4GHz Intel Core Duo processor as its main CPU. Still this marks a significant design win for ARM which finds itself sitting side-by-side with its main processor rival in a big brand name PC."

"The names are familiar: Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. These relatively new browsers have been shaking the foundations of Internet Explorer's complete victory over Netscape. These new browsers are implementing fresh ideas and breaking out of the crusty browsers of the early 21st century. With the second browser wars in full swing, let's see where things stand and what's coming."

Microsoft have released their free anti-virus and anti-malware software (codenamed 'Morro') to the public, under the name of 'Microsoft Security Essentials'.

In part three of TechCrunch's interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, they discuss web browsers. Ballmer calls Chrome and Safari marketshare numbers a "rounding error," and takes note of the fact that Google is going to be calling both its OS and browser "Chrome," pointing out that in this modern era, "the notion of operating systems being independent of internet access and internet ability to render important things in the internet is kind of not a sensible concept." In other words, he thinks it's unfair to persecute Microsoft for tying IE to Windows. He discusses Firefox, and rags on Google's OS strategy, and finished up on an evaluation of the Netbook/MID market and how Microsoft intends to compete there.

The European Union has stated today that it is taking the "exploding" iPhone issues very, very seriously. EU consumer watchdog Meglena Kuneva has explained that if national authorities find out that manufacturing faults are the cause of the issue, the iPhone will face an EU-wide recall.

Palm has released webOS 1.2 today - and it doesn't fix iTunes sync. It's got a whole boatload of new features though, so have fun exploring. Your Pre will update itself automatically over-the-air.

As you all undoubtedly know, the European Union and Microsoft are trying to work out some sort of a settlement regarding the Internet Explorer case. Microsoft made a very detailed proposal for a browser ballot screen earlier this year, and the EU was relatively satisfied. Now, various browser makers have told Reuters that they are not satisfied with Microsoft's proposal.

Phoronix was kind enough to add a deliciously lengthy nine-page compare and contrast between FreeBSD 8 and Ubuntu 9.10 to their arsenal of articles. "Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares. For looking more at the FreeBSD performance we also have included test results from FreeBSD 7.2, the current stable release. In this article are mostly the server and workstation oriented benchmarks with the testing being carried out on a dual AMD Opteron quad-core workstation."

Release candidate Linux 2.6.32-rc1 is out. Linus Torvalds has posted the announcement for the first release candidate of Linux kernel 2.6.32 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. "The Linux 2.6.32 kernel brings many driver updates, some new drivers, many file-system updates, and much more. Exciting us in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel is the ATI R600/700 kernel mode-setting and 3D support along with the VGA Arbitration code and the KMS page-flipping ioctl."

In that order. There was no show last week due to Thom being busy with work so we had two weeks of news to catch up on. Obviously, Haiku has to be mentioned once more and we are joined by Mike Ferland, an OSnews follower, halfway through the show.

When Intel unveiled its Light Peak optical interconnect (video) at IDF earlier this week, many noticed that the demonstration computer used to show the new technology was in fact a hackintosh. Well, thanks to Engadget we now know why: Apple is very, very involved in the conception of Light Peak. Let's take this opportunity to look at some of Apple's other connection standards from the past.