Software-Programming

USERS of Samsung's popular Linux powered smartphone, the Galaxy S, can now install the latest version of Android thanks to a leaked ROM.

The Galaxy S is becoming one of the best selling smartphones ever, with Samsung managing to shift tens of thousands of the devices every day. It's been reported that the company has managed to flog more than half a million units to South Koreans in just a month. Not surprisingly, users are looking forward to getting Android 2.2 installed. The leaked ROM shows that Samsung is well on its way to updating the phone to the latest version of Android.

During 2010, Firefox has had much of its momentum as an alternative Web browser stolen by Google Chrome. However, a new Firefox innovation called Tab Candy will make Firefox act more like a operating system, with much-improved multitasking and sharing capabilities. In fact, if the Firefox team can pull off all of the features of Tab Candy that it recently demonstrated, it would leapfrog Chrome in functionality.

Researchers and developers -- and for that matter, hackers -- can dramatically slash the time it takes to root out exploitable security vulnerabilities by using an open-source toolkit created at UC Berkeley, a noted bug hunter said today at Black Hat.

BitBlaze can cut the time required to identify a hackable bug from days or even weeks to just hours, said Charlie Miller, an analyst with Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), a Baltimore-based security consultancy. Miller presented his findings at the security conference that kicked off Wednesday in Las Vegas.

Just before the Black Hat security conference begins, Google has patched seven security holes in its stable version of Chrome and has begun an effort to speed up the software industry's response to such vulnerabilities.

Google paid two US$1337 bounties for work that lets Chrome avoid critical security problems by sidestepping vulnerabilities in Windows and the widely used glibc software library, according to a Monday blog post about Chrome 5.0.375.125 by Jason Kersey of Google's Chrome team.

Potential evidence has been uncovered regarding Android 3.0 (codenamed Gingerbread). Although most of the Android world is still awaiting an update to version 2.2 of Google's mobile operating system, the folks over at Phandroid have discovered what looks to be a Nexus One running a previously unseen version of Android. The validity of the image comes into question due to the obnoxious concealment of the device, along with the fact that it could very well be just a clever Photoshop job.

In my life I've probably written a few hundred thousand lines of Perl. I've modified and debugged roughly the same amount. Over the past few years, though, I don't think I've written more than a smattering of Perl code.

The more I use the HTC Incredible, the more I like it. And the thing that really makes the Incredible, er, incredible is its operating system, Android.

Android, as I'm sure you must know by now, was developed by Google, and is open in a way that the system it is most commonly compared to, iPhone's iOS operating system, isn't. A consequence of this openness is that third-party Android applications can easily get to market in sharp contrast to Apple's rather random iPhone application approval process.

Yahoo is considering investing in hackers with good ideas and technologies, a company executive said on Saturday.

"We are open to many ways of having a stake in creative young companies," said Jeff Kinder, Yahoo's senior vice president for media products and solutions, on the sidelines of a Yahoo Open Hack Day in Bangalore.

For the second time in two months, Mozilla on Friday rushed out a fix for Firefox to patch a problem with a browser update issued just days before.

Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6.8 on Friday to patch a single security problem and deal with what Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, called "a stability problem that affected some pages with embedded plug-ins." The company had released Firefox 3.6.7 two days earlier.

The fanboys are riled up -- the Android fanboys, that is. Earlier this week, InfoWorld ran my "mobile deathmatch" face-off between Google's Android OS and Apple's iOS. I got a bunch of strongly worded emails, some bordering on nasty, for my conclusion that Android is basically harder to use than iOS. Those comments, as well as ones from previous stories, reveal a lot about the psyche of "fandroids": They like intricate tech that requires mastery of secrets and tricks, much like dedicated gamers do.