jeramy b smith writes: “penguinppc.org has launched a new section to provide short bios of notable members of the PowerPC Linux community. The first bio is of a person who has been in the news lately, Jason Haas of LinuxPPC, Inc.”

Posted at LWN.net: There is a bug in the current version of the GNU C Library (glibc)
that is shipped with Immunix Linux 7.0-beta. This bug can allow
unprivileged users to read files that would normally be restricted
(like /etc/shadow). This is done by setting the RESOLV_HOST_CONF
environment variable to the file that the user wishes to read, and
then running any setuid root program (like sudo or ssh.) This causes
the restricted file to be written to stderr.

From LinuxPR: LinuxCertified.com, a leading provider of Linux training, will offer its next
weekend system administration bootcamp on February 10-11, 2001 in San
Francisco bay area (south bay). This workshop is designed for busy information
technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux
administration areas.

Upside reports on the possiblity that the StarOffice leader may leave Sun for greener pastures.

From a PC World story about chip tests: “The Athlon’s victory is just one of several that seems to indicate the analysts’ preference
for chips with tried and true technologies over sweeping new designs. In addition to
choosing the Athlon instead of the P4, analysts picked Intel’s Mobile Pentium III with
SpeedStep over Transmeta’s much hyped but poorly reviewed Crusoe CPU, and Sun’s
UltraSPARC III over Intel’s highly anticipated new Itanium.”

From BusinessWire: Product, Company and Technology Focus

SYS-CON Media, the world’s leading i-technology publisher, announced today that the first issue of Linux Weekly (www.LinuxWeekly.net), its
latest title, will be available March 15, 2001. Linux Weekly will initially be published on the first and the fifteenth of each month and a 24 times per year
schedule. Starting in October 2001, the tabloid will be published weekly, and will also be available on the newsstands in Germany, Austria, and
Switzerland under the name Linux Woche.

Avatar writes: “Evil3D would like to inform you that we have posted a driver comparision for the new Linux drivers from NVIDIA. Currently it only takes in benchmarks for a Geforce2 Ultra card, but we decided to post it anyhow as a problem has been discovered when using in conjunction with GeForce2 GTS & GeForce2 Ultra cards. Card owners may want to check this out before upgrading.”

MacWeek reports that the other version of Mac OS X, Server, is due for a “technical and cosmetic facelift early this year.” The OS will probably end up with the Aqua desktop interface and an updated version of AppleShare IP.

ZDNet UK reports on Caldera’s new proprietary Linux code, commenting on “a growing trend among Linux distributors to
develop proprietary code to differentiate themselves.”

A year after several high-profile sites were hit with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, most sites are still unprepared to deal with intrusions. ZDNet reports that defenses are almost so uniformly weak that it probably wouldn’t take much work to repeat the damage of last year’s attacks.