The end of an era! Or so they say. Yahoo! is up for sale. This of course after their current CEO got sacked through the phone. Classy. Once as powerful as Google on the web, refusing a few billion offer from Microsoft on the way, but now Yahoo! is actually for sale for a few bucks. And there are already some potential buyers too!
But they’re not the only ones that struck out. Samsung lost the legal battle and now cannot sell their Galaxy tab in Germany. Ouch. They’re also not going to buy WebOS but actually do have some interest in MeeGo… At the same time, HP detached WebOS from the PC division that they’re pushing off.
Some other interesting news were the moves of Linux and PHP to Git. Linus actually put it on GitHub. I’m not sure if PHP will go that way, but they are at least going to Git. Either way, I think such projects moving to GitHub is actually a good thing as it might draw in some attention from developers who’d otherwise shy away from obscure repositories. It lowers the access threshold and in turn might get more people active on those projects. Let’s hope more big projects make this kind of step… Firefox anyone? ;)
In other soap news, Carol wasn’t the only one that had to leave the ship. It seems there’s a mutiny a brew at TechCrunch after Michael Arrington left. Or was he fired? If this is the stuff we are hearing one may only wonder what we’re NOT hearing…
In security land it’s all about certificates. The Dutch CA Diginotar was hacked and fake certificates were issued. The hacker supposedly said he also controls a few other high profile CA’s. They’re taking this seriously and investigating. It seems the diginotar hack was discovered after a fake cert was used in Iran to spy on Gmail. All browsers are removing trust for Diginotar certs after over 500 fake certs have been found (you should be worried about those that have not been discovered. There’s actually an interesting aspect to this. As Apple’s Safari is the last browser to remove the trust of Diginotar, the question rises “what about mobile?”. Indeed, while desktop browsers have a fairly high update rate these days, the same cannot be said about mobile. How long will it be until mobile devices will revoke trust in Diginotar? Some devices will never. Interesting loop hole there, especially since mobile becomes more and more important in every day life. And personal security.
Enough about the web soap. It’s actually been a bit of a quiet week in our community. Red locomotive is a game engine. Emberwind an actual game (not in the previous engine ;). Then fox.js allows you to create column layouts in ascii style. If you want to use JPEG 2000 and be fairly certain it can be seen by your visitors there’s this script to add support for it. If you’re looking for a UX job description you might wanna see this generator. I’ll go for “Black Belt Front End Design Analyst” ;). INK is a visual html editor, but more in a graph kind of way. Or check out this very cool face manipulation demo in WebGL.
See you next week! :)