Monthly Archive:: May 2011

The concern for efficient and easy-to-use inter-process communication is prevalent among microkernel-based operating systems. Genode has always taken an unorthodox stance on this subject by disregarding the time-tested standard solution of using an IDL compiler in favour of sticking to raw C++ mechanisms. The new version 11.05 of the OS framework takes another leap by introducing a brand new API for implementing procedure calls across process boundaries, facilitating type safety and ease of use, yet still not relying on external tools. Furthermore, the platform support for the Fiasco.OC kernel has been extended to the complete feature set of the framework. The most significant new features are L4Linux (on Fiasco.OC), an experimental integration of GDB, ARM RealView PBX device drivers, and device I/O support for the MicroBlaze platform.

"John Perry Barlow - EFF co-founder, Grateful Dead lyricist, and, improbably, now a rancher - arrived in Paris and began tweeting up a storm from the e-G8 summit gathered there this week to discuss the future of the Internet." Incredible what Sarkozy is planning - how about he focus on the many problems in France the people there are actually suffering from?

Well, it took them long enough. Apple has finally acknowledged the existence of the MAC Defender trojan, and has offered removal instructions. The company has also promised a security update to Mac OS X that will block MAC Defender and its variants from working. All this information was published in the form of a support document on Apple's website. Update: Well, that was fast. A new variant of the trojan, called Mac Guard, has been discovered. Unlike previous variants, this one does not require users to enter their administrative password.

40 minutes and physical access. That's all russian company ElcomSoft is claiming to need in order to crack the 256-bit hardware encryption Apple uses to protect the data on iOS 4 devices. Full access to everything that's stored inside, including "historical information such as geolocation data, browsing history, call history, text messages and emails, usernames, data deleted by the user", is obtained.

"Apple has been assigned rights to over 200 patents and pending patent applications by Freescale Semiconductor, the chip design company spun off from Motorola in 2003. Though the exact details of the transaction aren't discernible from the public records, the bulk of the patents appear to be related to wireless communication hardware technology." Uh-oh. World, be prepared for even more patent lawsuits as Android continues to grow. Sigh.

We've already talked about Windows 8 so often you'd almost forget it had not yet been officially confirmed by Microsoft. Well, Steve Ballmer has announced that yes, it's going to be called Windows 8, and yes, it's going to arrive in 2012. "We're obviously hard at work on the next version of Windows," Ballmer said, "Windows 7 PCs will sell over 350 million units this year. We've done a lot in Windows 7 to improve customer satisfaction. We have a brand new user interface. We've added touch, and ink, and speech. And yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there's a whole lot more coming. As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8. Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors." Right-o. Update: A company spokesperson has retracted the statement, but whatever, we're not stupid.

Even though Google supports (some might say encourages) unlocking the bootloader and gaining root access on its own Nexus line of Android devices, it's currently blocking the newly announced Google Movies service on rooted devices.

MeetMeego.org has the dirt on the details of Nokia's next two MeeGo devices . To sum up: the first device, the (very) long-awaited N9, has a similar design to the N900 - a horizontal sliding 4-line keyboard, but this time with a tiltable screen, a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8-based processor, a 12MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens, and HDMI out. It will be a developer device, distributed at developer conferences such as the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in a couple of days.

"So far. we have seen 39 development cycles of Linux 2.6 and the 40th is about to start. However, Linux 2.6.39 might be the end of the Linux 2.6 series. In an email, Linus Torvalds wrote that the numbers are becoming too big and he might thinking of giving the next release a version number of 2.8.0. In the ensuing discussion, Torvalds wrote that a version number of 3.0 is also a strong possibility", as a natural way to introduce a new numbering scheme where odd numbers are also used for stable releases and feature releases increment the second digit.

"After months of development, Fedora 15, codenamed "Lovelock" has finally been released today." Highlights of this release include restart-free firewall configuration, a switch to Gnome 3, LibreOffice, PowerTOP 2.x and systemd, "Consistent Network Device Naming", and... Rupee symbol support for Indian users.

"The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale. This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license."

Yes, it's still being updated. OS/2 eComStation 2.1 has been released by Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV. The market for eComStation may not be particularly huge, but it still has its niches here and there. Since there might be folks here that aren't in the know: eComStation is the commercial continuation of IBM's OS/2, developed to support modern hardware.

Mac sales in the enterprise during Apple's last fiscal quarter grew a whopping 66 percent, significantly outpacing the rest of the PC market, which grew just 4.5 percent in the enterprise. The data from Apple's previous fiscal quarter was highlighted on Friday by analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company. He said though he originally viewed success in the enterprise as a "one-quarter blip," it now appears to be a "durable platform" for Apple.

Version 2.6.39 once again took Linus Torvalds and his fellow developers less than 70 days to complete. This is further indication of a slight, though ever more apparent, increase in the kernel's development speed, as about 80 to 90 days still passed between the release of two versions one or two years ago. With 2.6.39, this also meant that there was a slight decrease in the number of advancements which are worth mentioning in the Kernel Log; however, there are still plenty of changes that will make Linux faster and better.