The source code for Oracle's Solaris 11 operating system is now out in the open for anyone to peruse and compile, thanks to a furtive posting of a compressed archive that has been mirrored across scores of bitstreams and filesharing sites. But so far, Oracle hasn't moved to do anything about it, and the question remains whether the code was leaked by a disgruntled Oracle employee, or if this is the strangest open-source code-drop in history.

Rather than it being a stealth code drop by Oracle or an attempt to trap open source developers, many in the community believe the leak is just that—a leak by a disgruntled Oracle employee. And Cantrill said there are no doubt plenty of those, as Oracle has disenfranchised many engineers and the company's culture has driven away a large portion of Sun's engineering talent—including Cantrill himself, who left Oracle in July of 2010.

So far, there are reports that the vulnerability is being exploited in limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader 9.x on Windows. However, the bug also affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.4.6 and earlier 9.x versions for UNIX and Macintosh computers, as well as Adobe Reader X (10.1.1) and Acrobat X (10.1.1) and earlier 10.x versions on Windows and Mac.

Patches for Windows and Mac users of Adobe Reader X and Acrobat X will come on the next quarterly update, scheduled for Jan. 10, 2012. The fix for Adobe Reader 9.x for UNIX will come Jan. 12 as well.

Internet Explorer's desktop market share, which has been in a near-constant free-fall since 2003, held steady in November. Meanwhile, Chrome has moved to within striking distance of Firefox, with Mozilla's browser likely to lose its second place spot within the next few months.

Firefox's users are having a much harder time of things. Mozilla's failure to provide a robust automatic update process and refusal to force extensions to use a fixed, consistent programmatic interface means that upgrading requires manual intervention, and stands a good chance of breaking extensions. As a result, its rapid releases aren't showing the same clean cut overs and high adoption that Chrome achieves.

Nginx (pronounced "engine-ex") is a lightweight Web server with a reputation for speed, speed, speed. It differs from Apache in a fundamental way—Apache is a process- and thread-driven application, but Nginx is event-driven. The practical effect of this design difference is that a small number of Nginx "worker" processes can plow through enormous stacks of requests without waiting on each other and without synchronizing; they just "close their eyes" and eat the proverbial elephant as fast as they can, one bite at a time.

For larger websites, it's often employed as a front-end Web server to quickly dish up unchanging page content, while passing on requests for dynamic stuff to more complex Apache Web servers running elsewhere.

According to the game's publisher, Activision, Modern Warfare 3 generated over $400 million in revenue and sold 6.5 million units in the U.S. and U.K. in its first 24 hours on store shelves. By hitting that mark, Modern Warfare 3, which launched Tuesday, easily outpaced its predecessor and the former leader, Call of Duty: Black Ops, which generated $360 million on its launch day last year. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had the best launch of all time prior to Black Ops, posting launch-day sales of $310 million.

Last year, the company announced that Black Ops set a six-week sales record by generating $1 billion in revenue.

Bypassing the unlock screen on iPad 2 can be accomplished by first pressing the power button until the power-off screen is displayed. Users then need only to close and reopen the fondleslab's 'smart cover' before, finally, pressing the cancel button to unlock the device.

One obvious workaround would be to instruct users to close any foreground application before locking their iPad.

The Document Foundation, which is developing the LibreOffice software suite, has demonstrated the business software working entirely in the browser for cloud applications, and has announced that it will also port it to Android and iOS.

The French government has also thrown its support behind the LibreOffice project, specifying the software for all its future Windows systems, and transitioning 500,000 existing Windows users from OpenOffice.

Mozilla has decided that when it comes to Android devices, performance is more important than the wealth of add-ons that can be used to customize Firefox.

Yesterday, Mozilla Director of Firefox Engineering Johnathan Nightingale announced on a mailing list that Firefox will move to Android's native user interface, ditching the XUL technology that's been in use by Mozilla since before there even was a Firefox.

One possibility, according to some meeting notes on native-UI Firefox, is blunter: "Extensions are gone."

Mozilla has postponed its plan to prompt Firefox 3.6 users to upgrade to the latest version of the open-source Web browser to make sure its servers are up to snuff.

"The previously scheduled 3.6-to-7.0.1 advertised update is now postponed while we make sure our server capacity is sufficient for release," said release manager Christian Legnitto in a blog post.

Firefox 7 is one of the new series of rapid-release versions of the browser, with smaller updates now coming every six weeks rather than a dramatically different version coming every year to a year and a half.

It is hoped switching to Chromesque updates in the background will eradicate "update fatigue" creeping in following Mozilla's decision to pump out upgrades more frequently.

In August, however, Baker revealed Mozilla's rapid release cycle was causing problems for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers must go through cycles of testing to ensure that the software and add-ons that they rely on work with the new version of the browser, and re-code where needed.

Only in June, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler handed browser rivals an easy victory by claiming that the enterprise had never, and would never, be a focus for Firefox.

Mozilla issued a statement in response to the sound of jaws collectively dropping that made it clear the group stood behind Dotzler, part of the original Firefox team and founder of Mozilla's Quality Assurance (QA) and Testing Program.