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.

Rackspot, a spinoff of the Portuguese Internet service provider NFSI, is making a plea for IPv6 to participants at the WebhostingDay 2009 (WHD09) currently happening at Phantasialand in Bruehl near Cologne, Germany

Linus Torvalds announced at the Australian Linux.conf.au that he wants to make the conference mascot, the Tasmanian Devil (considering that the conference took place in Hobart, Tasmania) the new logo for Linux Kernel 2.6.29.

The recently updated Java Specification Requests (JSRs) show that the licensing battle between the Apache Software Foundation and Sun Microsystems (the force behind Java) still hasn't ended after raging for seven years.

Andrew van der Stock from the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is porting Enterprise Security API (ESAPI) methods to PHP.

The upcoming GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) version 4.4 will combine the existing Graphite loop optimization with autopar automatic parallelization support.

The Ubuntu User Forum reports users with data loss after installing applications on the ext4 filesystem. Kernel developer Ted Ts'o is already on top of it.

Zenwalk 6.0 has shown some real work: the project has separated from GNOME Office and MPlayer, brings a new desktop version and provides numerous optimizations.