Nokia's flagship smartphone, the N900, just got another exclusive in the mobile marketplace: a port of the open-source Chromium web browser, based on Google's Chrome project. As reported over on Engadget, the move is an unofficial port of the Chromium sourcecode to run on the Maemo Linux platform that forms the core of Nokia's top-end N900 smartphone.
Adobe will flip the switch next week on a service that silently updates customers' copies of its popular Reader and Acrobat PDF programs, the company's chief security executive said today.
Background updating in Adobe Reader Updater and the Adobe Acrobat Reader will be enabled on Tuesday, April 13, when Adobe delivers its next regularly-scheduled set of patches for the two programs, said Brad Arkin, the company's director for product security and privacy. "Starting Tuesday, we will turn on the server, and the new updater will take effect," said Arkin.
Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS's components for better security.
The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other.
Adobe on Thursday will announce the patches it plans to deliver next week for its PDF software, a part of its quarterly security update process.
The impending updates will come on the heels of Adobe urging users yesterday to beef up defenses in Reader and Acrobat. The company also said it may issue a patch for the design flaw, which lets attackers run executable code on a Windows PC from a malformed PDF without needing to exploit an actual vulnerability. It's unlikely that the patch will appear next week, however.
As promised, Geohot aka George Hotz has found a work around for the removal of OtherOS: Custom Firmware. Geohot has dubbed his firmware “3.21OO”. Based upon his blog entry, it won’t require opening the PS3, and will be possible by restoring a custom generated pup file. From his blog:
It's the newest thing out there; all the "cool" kids are doing it. Well, that is, the few geniuses who have managed to actually hack into Microsoft's impenetrable mobile operating system and retool it to make it work as Google Android.
This isn't just some high-tech prank where people can say, "Hey look what I did!" This is actually becoming a viable resource for people who like the ergonomics of a Windows Mobile device but prefer the elegance of the Android OS.
SOME DETAILS about North Korea's much rumoured Red Star operating system are slowly starting to emerge.
In late February a Russian blogger purchased and stripped down a copy of the operating system, detailing its features and requirements.
The blogger tells us that Red Star requires a Pentium III 800MHz CPU, 256MB RAM and a 3GB hard drive to run. It is Linux-based, but apes the Microsoft Windows look and feel. Red Star is not feature rich, but offers an apparent clone of the Firefox web browser, text, video and PDF viewers, image tools, a calculator and a handful of games.
Mozilla is out this week with Firefox 3.5.9 and 3.0.19 updates, fixing multiple security vulnerabilities in the open source Web browser's two branches, while announcing that the older of the two branches is being phased out.
As part of the update, Mozilla also issued new advisories on problems that also impact Firefox 3.6.2 browser, which it released last week, in addition to the 3.5.x and 3.0.x browsers. With the 3.0.19 update, Mozilla is pledging to end the 3.0.x branch, which first debuted in June 2008.
Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.30, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment and of its developer platform. Released on schedule, to the day, GNOME 2.30 builds on top of a long series of successful six months releases to offer the best experience to users and developers.
Palm is warning that installing on the Palm Pre smartphone an unauthorised kernel, created by two hackers to spur the phone's performance, will likely void the warranty. An online video shows a customised Pre responding immediately and smoothly with multiple applications active, and an "insanely fast" web browser.
The overclocking patches, one for 720MHz and one for 800MHz, are the work of hackers unixpsycho and caj2008. They dubbed the code an "optimised kernel" for webOS 1.4 only on Palm Pre or Palm Pre Plus, not the Pixi smartphone models.
