The BBC reports that the last mission to the Mir space station launched Wednesday morning in the form of a Progress cargo ship. The space station will be brought out of orbit and mostly burn up in the atmosphere fairly soon, marking the end of its 15 year life.

Linux Journal reports that the US Military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is beginning research into high-security systems based on current Open Source operating systems.

IDG reports on the first project to be started at the Open Source Development Lab, which opens Wednesday in Oregon. The first project is intended to boost the number of systems that can be connected to a network at any given time.

ZDNet challenges the passionate defenders of operating systems, reminding users that what a system does is more important to most users than its underlying philosophy.

SecurityPortal.com has a technical piece on Netfilter: “The 2.4 kernel’s packet filtering system, Netfilter, is Linux’s first stateful firewall. Stateful firewalls represent
a major technological jump in the intelligence of a firewall and are present in all serious Enterprise
firewalling products. Among many enhancements, this ‘statefulness’ allows Netfilter to block/detect many
stealth scans that were previously undetected on Linux firewalls.”

A column at LinuxWorld explains the advantage of PHP over other scripting languages. “Should you learn PHP? Probably so, if: you’re responsible for a Website; others in your organization like using PHP;
you want something ‘lighter’ and easier to learn than Perl or Python; you favor free software …”

From PR Web: Today, Plesk announced its release of Plesk Server Administrator 1.3.1 (PSA) software. Developed for RedHat 7.x and FreeBSD 4.x operating systems, PSA
is a web-based server management tool for UNIX- and Linux-based
servers. It allows administrators and clients to share the server
support workload, by enabling both to remotely access and perform
server management tasks in a few clicks.

From PR Newswire: Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) announced today that Microsoft
Corporation has agreed to settle Sun’s lawsuit regarding the Java technology.
The settlement reached today will protect the future integrity of the Java
platform. In addition, as part of the agreement, Microsoft has agreed to pay
Sun $20 million, to accept Sun’s termination of the prior license agreement,
and to a permanent injunction against unauthorized use of Sun’s JAVA
COMPATIBLE trademark.

A story at LinuxWorld deals with the crucial issue of accessing Windows files from Linux. “Anyone who uses both Linux and Windows knows the problem. You need a couple of files that are on the Windows partition, but
you forgot to copy them to a floppy or to the server before rebooting to Linux. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just access those
files from Linux, you think, as you prepare yourself for two more reboots.

As it turns out, there are a number of ways to solve that problem. You can mount your Windows partitions under Linux and you can
access your ext2 filesystems under Windows.”

The Duke of URL has a review: “This is the first release of Linux that is said to truly stack up against Windows as far as speed and compatibility go. It wasn’t too long ago that Linux
didn’t have much support, but in the last year we’ve seen many vendors hop on the bandwagon. NVidia, ATI, Abit, Lexmark, 3dfx, and SMC are
just a few of the vendors that showed their support in Linux over the last year. Still, many companies need to come around, as many third-party
hackers were needed to even spur developments of drivers for Linux.”