Mozilla Jetpack makes it so easy to filter, modify, and mash up pages that it might end up pitting developers and users against content producers in a battle for the Web, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. By allowing users to modify the behavior, presentation, and output of Web apps and pages to their liking, Jetpack brings us one step closer to a more democratic Web. Yet, as Jetpack produces fruit, expect more SaaS providers and media companies to call for 'guardrails for the Internet.'

There are several ways to run Windows programs on Linux (virtualisation, WINE) and vice versa really isn't a problem either with Cygwin, or better yet, native ports thanks to the Windows variants of Gtk+ and Qt. Still, what if Windows support was built straight into the Linux kernel? Is something like that even possible? Sure it is, and the Chinese figured it'd be an interesting challenge, and called it the Linux Unified Kernel.

There's been a new release of DOSBox, version 0.73. It's got support for more graphics modes and cards, improved Vista support, new OPL emulation cores, sound fixes and improvements for Mac OS X, lots of compatibility fixes, lots of CD-ROM detection improvements, lots of memory (EMS/XMS) improvements, various fixes and enhancements for the recompiling core, and much more.

"The Serial ATA International Organization today, made the third-generation SATA interface official. The new interface provides a 6 Gbps high-speed serial data connection between the system and most of today's data storage devices such as hard drives, solid-state drives, optical drives, and enterprise tape drives. The interface also provides connectivity to external storage devices in its eSATA port variant. It is 100% backwards compatible with devices that support the SATA 150 MB/s and SATA II 300 MB/s standards."

Apple has quietly updated its cheapest notebook offering, the white MacBook at EUR 999. "The bump measures in at just 0.13GHz on the processor, 133MHz more oomph from the DDR2 SDRAM, and an extra 40GB of disk space." A modest speed bump, but welcome nonetheless, especially as the price remains steady.

StreamOS 2.0-RC1 has been released. "I've just released first release candidate of 0.21. It's connected with two final improvements: new locking subsystem, that seems to work great, and new keys handler, that doesn't eat CPU anymore, which has made StreamOS faster and more responsive." StreamOS is 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using Free Pascal Compiler.

There has been a lot of talk about Android maybe making its way to various netbooks. However, thanks to the boys and girls at Canonical, Android might be taking a completely different direction when it comes to these little laptops: they're building an execution environment which will allow Android applications to run on normal Linux distributions.

Getting Mac OS X up and running on a computer without an Apple label has always been a bit of a hassle. You needed customised Mac OS X disks, updates would ruin all your hard work, and there was lots of fiddling with EFI and the likes. Ever since the release of boot-132, this is no longer the case. Read on for how setting up a "Hack"intosh really is as easy as 1, 3, 2.

We've got some serious progress for Haiku for you. Firstly, the Haiku WiFi stack compiled for the first time. Eventually, it will be a native WiFi stack with FreeBSD driver compatibility, much like the ordinary Haiku network stack. Secondly, progress has also been made in TV card support.

Eric Paris, a SELinux developer, has announced today a new SELinux feature: "Dan and I (mostly Dan) have started to play with using SELinux to confine random untrusted binaries. The program is called 'sandbox.' The idea is to allow administrators to lock down tightly untrusted applications in a sandbox where they can not use the network and open/create any file that is not handed to the process. Can be used to protect a system while allowing it to run some untrusted binary."

In our latest "Ask OSNews" installment, a reader asks: "Do you think Apple will ever have a standalone Windows version of their email app so that us Window users can download and use it? My family and I currently use Incredimail and occasionally Thunderbird."

I recently started using Git for my local revision control. Since I spend about 90% of my coding time inside the Vim editor, I went looking for a plugin that would make Vim play nice with Git. In this article I present two different vim plugins and explore their feature-set via screenshots.

The Safari 4 beta is having a little bit of trouble cleaning up after itself, as has been revealed by C. Harwic on his blog. Safari 4 is still in beta, so it's easy to forgive the browser for this rather sloppy housekeeping, which left gigabytes (!) of browsing data in weird places all over your filesystem, even after cleaning the caches or history. Still, this does raise a few questions.

Over the years, we've occasionally run an "Ask OSNews" feature, wherein a reader asks us a question and we answer it publicly. Lately I've really been enjoying Slate's Dear Prudence advice column and the ever-interesting Straight Dope, and I thought we should see if we can get more OSNews readers to submit questions, and turn Ask OSNews into a more-regular thing. If your question falls outside of our domain expertise, we'll try to track down an expert to help out. And of course, our responses will always be supplemented by further advice from OSNews readers in the comments. Questions are welcome on any topic ranging from OSes and computing to science and geek culture. Contact us with your questions. (Please include "Ask OSNews" in the subject). Today's question is from a young student in Hungary who's seduced by the faraway siren song of Apple's marketing and wonders, "should I switch?"