Android more vulnerable than iPhone

According to security-software maker Trend Micro, Google's Android operating system for mobile devices is more vulnerable to hackers and viruses than Apple's iPhone platform, writes Businessweek.com

“Android is open source, which means the hacker can also understand the underlying architecture and source code,” Steve Chang, chairman of Trend Micro, the world's largest provider of security software for corporate servers, said in an interview. “We have to give credit to Apple, because they are very careful about it. It's impossible for certain types of viruses to operate on the iPhone”, he said.

Google, owner of the world's most-popular online search engine, offers Android for free and allows developers access to its code for writing software. Apple, whose iOS software trails Android in smartphone market share, requires every application to be approved before being sold in its online store.

Open source advocates celebrating reports that a Microsoft-led consortium has withdrawn plans to buy hundreds of Novell patents will have to put the corks back in the champagne bottles, says Informationweek.com.

Last week Microsoft sent a statement saying its withdrawals of the plan from German regulators was just a procedural matter. Bottom line: Nothing has changed. "This is a purely procedural step necessary to provide time to allow for review of the proposed transaction," the statement says.

The software maker's response was to an earlier report that the consortium, called CPTN Holdings and formed by Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC, had withdrawn its plan to buy more than 880 Novell patents for $450 million. Some of those patents are believed to cover technology used in open source software

Jaspersofthas delivered a new release of its open source business intelligence (BI)software, offering an improved user interface framework and new customisation and integration capabilities geared toward developers who build the toolset into their applications, writes CRN.com.

ISVs and developers who embed Jaspersoft within their applications account for 60%of the company's business, said CEO Brian Gentile. "We expect this release to continue and extend our lead in embeddable BI," he saysof the new Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite 4 software, which is generally available starting this week.

Jaspersoft offers a free 'community'edition of its software and a commercial version with what the company says is added capabilities and support. There have been 12.5 million downloads of the software and there are 185 000 registered community members, according to Gentile. Jaspersoft has 13 000 commercial customers, including 1 000 that subscribe to the full product suite.