Oracle and the missing trademark

Oracle's trademark on the popular Hudson open-source project doesn't exist; at least for now, reports The Register.

Oracle claimed it acquired the Hudson trademark with its purchase of Sun Microsystems. But a well-placed former Sun Microsystems employee has contacted The Register to say that Sun took an "explicit decision" not to apply for a trademark on the name Hudson.

A search of the US Patent and Trademark Office's Web site throws up 623 trademarks for Hudson for many things, but not for the project Oracle owns, the report states.

Now that Microsoft has done a 180 and now supports people hacking its new Kinect full-body motion control system, real-world applications beyond dance games are coming fast and furious, writes MassHigh Tech.

The latest is from the MIT Media Lab and is eerily reminiscent of the movie 'Minority Report'. Researchers at the Media Lab created an open-source extension for the Chrome browser from Google that allows the browser to be controlled using hand gestures detected by a hacked Kinect system.

Using gestures like a grab, or an up or down swipe can do things like click on links or scroll up or down in Web pages. The software is called DepthJS and apparently is just a Javascript program that connects to the hacked code that runs the Kinect. A video posted on ReadWriteWeb shows the young researchers demonstrating the Web browsing and it looks smooth and responsive.

The maintainers of the ProFTP open-source FTP server package have issued a warning to users of an attack on its site that left the source files infected with a back-door Trojan, says Thinq.

The attack, reported on the ProFTPD user mailing list, is thought to have occurred on 28 November by an unknown assailant who breached security in the main source repository's FTP software to replace the ProFTPD source code files with a copy containing a malicious back-door.

The affected files were distributed both on the official ProFTPD project download server and the distribution mirror service - potentially meaning that between the attack on the 28th and the flaw being discovered and patched late on 1 December, all source packages downloaded will have contained the back-door code.