Apple on Thursday plugged over two dozen security exploits within the client and server versions of its Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther' and Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' operating systems that could potentially expose Mac users to a variety of malicious attacks.

Lots of Windows-related news today. Firstly, responding to customer demand, Dell has restarted selling new PCs with Windows XP installed on them. Secondly, Microsoft software will sell for just USD 3 in some parts of the world in an attempt to double the number of global PC users (probably not at all unrelated to this interesting figure). Lastly, Vista may only be three months old in the retail marketplace, but Microsoft is already seeking participants in the beta testing program for the next version of Windows Media Center, codenamed Fiji. Update: Microsoft denied the sales figures in China to News.com.

The GNOME Foundation announced today the GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative (GMAE) today at the Embedded Linux Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The initiative is aimed at bolstering GNOME usage as an embedded and mobile development platform. The initiative has been in development since last year, says GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh. The platform will be distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). In the next 12 months the group plans to add a mobile email framework called Tinymail, the GeoClue geolocation service, Java Mobile & Embedded (Java ME), PulseAudio audio management, and the HAL hardware information system.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce version 7.04 of the Ubuntu family of distributions (more info here and here). Ubuntu 7.04 is also the basis for new 7.04 releases of Kubuntu (screenshots) and Edubuntu. Ubuntu 7.04 will be supported for 18 months on both desktops and servers. Here is a review of Feisty Fawn, and it also seems that Michael Dell has it installed too. Get it while it's hot.

Thunderbird 2 is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux in over 35 languages. It offers easy ways to manage and organize your email with message tags, advanced folder views, message history navigation, find as you type, and improved new mail alert notifications. Thunderbird 2 also includes a refreshed user interface and support for Microsoft Vista.

The browser wars are over, and now Microsoft, Mozilla and other vendors plan to focus on positioning the browser as a development platform. That was the consensus of a panel of representatives at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo who help develop Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and the Google Reader.

"iXsystems announced an agreement with Adobe Systems that will allow the next version of PC-BSD to have a Flash-enabled browser available on a default installation. The Linux version of Adobe's popular Flash player will run on PC-BSD using FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer." In other news, snapshots of the development branch of PC-BSD are now available and built three times a week.

The NetBSD Project is glad to participate in the Google Summer of Code for the third time in a row as a mentoring organization and is pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer (full details in the press release). Development on these projects will begin shortly, so make sure to follow the relevant mailing lists.

Apple's new 'Stuffed' commercial pokes fun at preinstalled applications - better known as craplets - loaded up on new Windows PCs. Apple isn't alone in the craplet disdain. Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg wrote columns on April 5 and April 12 about the craplet dilemma. Mossberg identified two problems: "One is the plethora of teaser software and advertisements for products that must be cleared and uninstalled to make way for your own stuff. The second is the confusing welter of security programs you have to master and update, even on a virgin machine."

"Nokia's latest device, the N800 Internet Tablet, is unique, to say the least. It's not a smartphone, yet it can send and receive e-mail messages; it's not a phone, yet it can make phone calls; it's not a portable multimedia player; yet it can playback audio/video files; and it's not a notebook, yet it can browser the web. Are you confused yet? Alright, let's see if we can define the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. The N800 does a lot of things, but it can't be placed in any one of the multitude of portable categories. Nope, it's in a category all by itself."

GNUstep Base 1.14.0 has been released: "This release continues the process of cleanup and restructuring to further improve MacOS-X compatibility, fix bugs, optimise performance, and improve portability between different hardware/operating system platforms." GNUstep Make 2.0.0 has also been released: "Version 2.0.0 is a new major release of gnustep-make which includes a number of major changes compared to previous 1.x releases."

Even more Haiku news today. Oliver Ruiz Dorantes, who will be monitoring GSoC student Salvatore Benedetto coming summer, has started work on what will become an office suite for Haiku. His blog already shows the first screenshots of the project. He is seeking for help on the project, so if you have the experience, feel free t help him out. Also, a new batch of icons has been added to Haiku.

Let me begin by telling you a little story. Some time ago I needed to run a script at work once a day. We had tons of machines ranging from big Unix servers to Linux desktops. Due to various reasons the script could only be run on a desktop machine. However using cron was disabled on desktops. All other machines allowed cron.

AbiWord 2.5.1 has been released for AmigaOS4 using Cygnix. Besides AbiWord's usual word processing features, this package also includes a KHTML-based browser for AmigaOS4. "Additionally, for displaying the online help files the KHTML based browser, 'osb-browser', is included! This browser has following features: standards compliant (x)html rendering engine with CSS support; Javascript support; SSL support."