Milestone 5 for the coming Java Development Kit 7 includes just minor changes. Despite these little updates, JDK 7 has caused quite a stir.

Google is just not getting enough. After its own browser and a Linux-based operating system, it's now coming up with its own programming language. Behind its development lurk some of the legends in UNIX history.

A research group in the computer sciences faculty at North Carolina State University has written a prototype to prevent rootkits from manipulating kernel object hooks to do their damage.

What a few years ago might have been considered a joke has now become reality: thanks to the Mono Tools for Visual Studio, developers can create RPM packages directly from the MS environment.

The Apache Directory Studio LDAP frontend with browser and editor awaits new functions for exporting to Open Document Format and editing attribute types and object classes. The release includes a couple dozen enhancements and 50 bugfixes.

So unreal the name, so real the news: Epic Games is providing its Unreal Engine 3 free to developers. It isn't open source, but game developers can implement it for noncommercial games and applications.

The Scientific Linux distro, which derives from the freely licensed sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is now available in version 5.4.

The current discussion in the Ubuntu forums is about a possible security hole in GNOME, specifically about GNOME registered users having their passwords appear as cleartext on the keyring. Not a bug, say its defenders, but the security concept behind the GNOME keyring.