The Netfilter team has long been mulling over rework of firewall code in the Linux kernel. Now team lead Patrick McHardy ends months of work by announcing nftables.

After years of development, version 1.0 of the Parrot virtual machine has arrived for Perl, Python and other dynamic languages. Whether the Parrot will take a firm foothold in software development is still up in the air.

Corrections and security updates for the current stable Debian have been released.

The remote package update manager program apt-dater is now available in version 0.7. It performs software updates on a mass of remote hosts.

Advisory Check (advchk), a small tool for monitoring installed software security, is now available in version 2.20. It has extended its source feeds and is now supported on HP-UX.

Adobe Systems has issued a prerelease version of project Alchemy, a small tool that compiles C and C++ code for programs running on ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The idea is to expand the capabilities of Web applications running on Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5.

Open source developer Tobias Oetiker, in his presentation at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego, described how he could help one thousand Windows users at Swisscom.com speed up their computers.