"Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests." How such prestigious nations with such long and proud histories, like Sweden, The Netherlands, and so on, can succumb to pressure from a former colony is beyond me. We should know better.

Clemens Toennies has announced the release of Netrunner 4.1, the latest update of the project's Kubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution featuring the KDE 4.7.4 desktop - now also available in a 64-bit variant: "Accompanying the release of Netrunner 64-bit edition, we today release version 4.1 for 32-bit systems with....

"A group of European regulators has written to Google calling on it to halt the introduction of its new privacy policy, saying it needs to investigate whether the proposals sufficiently protect users' personal data." I'd rather regulators are on top of this now than when it's too late and we're all plugged into the Google Hivemind Overlord.

"Samsung, in its first acknowledgment of the European Commission's antitrust investigation of its patent licensing practices, Friday said it believed the commission would ultimately conclude the company complies with the rules. The investigation arose out of Samsung's dispute with Apple over trademarks and patents that cover smartphones and tablet computers."

Meric Mara has announced the release of KahelOS 020212, a desktop Linux distribution and live DVD featuring the GNOME 3 desktop and based on Arch Linux: "Following the release of KahelOS 111111 last November is today's launch of KahelOS 020212. KahelOS 020212 improves on what the earlier installer....

Cyrille Pontvieux has announced the release of Salix OS 13.37 "Live Xfce" edition, a Slackware-based live CD featuring the latest Xfce desktop: "The Live team is proud to present the final release of Salix OS Live Xfce 13.37. After some months developing, testing and improving a lot of....

There's an article making the rounds right now about how applications on iOS crash more often than applications on Android. I'm not going to detail the entire methodology - the article itself does so - but it does raise an interesting talking point about how both mobile operating systems handle application crashes and updates.

LinuxDevices.com is carrying a brief note from the "outgoing editor-in-chief" stating that the site's owner has been acquired. "At this point, the future of LinuxDevices.com is uncertain. What we can say for sure is that it has been a pleasure serving our readers -- the best in the business."

Slackware has been silent for some time (noted in this comment thread). Although we haven't seen any advisories in the LWN mailbox, the changelogs are showing some new updates. Slackware users should update their systems.

Greg KH has released stable kernels 3.0.19, 3.2.3 and 2.6.32.56. All of them have important fixes across the board.

Update 3.2.4 has now been released to address a compilation problem in 3.2.3.

CentOS has updated ghostscript (C6; C5; C4: multiple vulnerabilities), php (C6; C5; C4: remote code execution), and C5: php53 (remote code execution).

Debian has updated iceweasel (multiple vulnerabilities), iceape (multiple vulnerabilities), and php5 (remote code execution).

Mandriva has updated mozilla (multiple vulnerabilities).

Red Hat has updated RHEL5: php53 (remote code execution), RHEL4,5,6: php (remote code execution), ghostscript (RHEL5,6; RHEL4: multiple vulnerabilities), and RHEL5.6: freetype (code execution).

Scientific Linux has updated SL5: php53 (remote code execution), SL4,5,6: php (remote code execution), and ghostscript (SL5,6; SL4: multiple vulnerabilities).

Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 12 "KDE" edition: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 12 KDE. Linux Mint 12 KDE comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.....

Bill Reynolds has announced the release of PCLinuxOS 2012.02, the latest stable update of the project's mainstream distribution. There are no major new features as the Linux kernel remains at version 2.6.38.8 and the KDE desktop at 4.6.5. From the release announcement: "PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE-MiniME 2012.02 are....

Kate Stewart has announced the availability of the second alpha release of Ubuntu 12.04, code name "Precise Pangolin": "Welcome to Precise Pangolin Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 12.04. Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the....

There are different reasons people use Unix-like operating systems, including configurable, availability free of charge, powerful command line interface an many more. Some people are motivated by the moral issue: they reject non-free software. Specifically for such users Free Software Foundation developed Guidelines for Free System Distributions and created the list of absolutely free ("as in freedom") distributions. In this article we are going to look at the most recent entry on the list - Parabola GNU/Linux. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

"Google has added an automated scanning process that is designed to keep malicious apps out of the Android Market , the company announced today. The new service, code-named 'Bouncer', scans apps for known malware, spyware, and Trojans, and looks for suspicious behaviors and compares them against previously analyzed apps. Every app is then run on Google's cloud infrastructure to simulate how the software would operate on an Android device, he said. Existing apps are continuously analyzed, too."

This is the kind of news just tailor-made for OSNews. After 16 years of trusty service, the venerable Windows CE will be history as far as Microsoft's mobile operating system offering goes - the next major version of Windows Phone will use the NT kernel from Windows 8. As a heavy former Windows PocketPC Mobile CE Ultimate SP2 Edition user, this makes me sad. As a fan of the NT kernel, this makes me happy.

The PHP 5.3.10 release is out; it contains a fix for a remote code execution bug introduced recently by another security fix. Anybody running 5.3.9 should probably upgrade as soon as possible.

The H is reporting that a critical remote code execution bug has been found in PHP that was caused by the recent fix for the widespread denial of service via hash collisions vulnerability. "The cause of the problem is the security update to PHP 5.3.9, which was written to prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks using hash collisions. To do so, the developers limited the maximum possible number of input parameters to 1,000 in php_variables.c using max_input_vars. Because of mistakes in the implementation, hackers can intentionally exceed this limit and inject and execute code. The bug is considered to be critical as code can be remotely injected over the web."

CentOS has updated openssl (C4: multiple vulnerabilities).

Debian has updated tomcat6 (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated BackupPC (F15; F16: cross-site scripting), polipo (F15; F16: denial of service), moodle (F15; F16: multiple vulnerabilities), firefox (F16: multiple vulnerabilities), xulrunner (F16: multiple vulnerabilities), thunderbird (F16: multiple vulnerabilities), thunderbird-lightning (F16: multiple vulnerabilities), gstreamer-plugins-bad-free (F16: multiple vulnerabilities), and libvpx (F16: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated apache (multiple vulnerabilities).

Oracle has updated firefox (OL4; OL5; OL6: multiple vulnerabilities), seamonkey (OL4: multiple vulnerabilities), thunderbird (OL4; OL6: multiple vulnerabilities), and openssl (OL4: multiple vulnerabilities).

Red Hat has updated openssl (RHEL 4: multiple vulnerabilities)

Scientific Linux has updated thunderbird (SL4&5; SL6: multiple vulnerabilities), firefox (multiple vulnerabilities), seamonkey (SL4: multiple vulnerabilities), and openssl (SL4: multiple vulnerabilities).