As if ICANN didn’t have enough problems with its selection of new top level domain names, now the American Civil Liberties Union is giving the group grief for its choices. InfoWorld reports that the ACLU is heading up a group of “cyber rights advocates” who argue that “by limiting the domain space, ICANN and the Commerce Department have failed to recognize the needs and free speech rights of Internet users and non-commercial organizations.”

Check out the latest modules posted tp use Perl for this week. Highlights: XML-CSV for transforming comma-separated values to XML; access Windows .ini and .reg files with Config-Ini; manage your email with Man-Procmail.

Darn it all to heck, the wireless Web is supposed to be the next big thing, but those pesky American consumers just won’t cooperate with that particular marketing fantasy. Perhaps it’s because services are overpriced? Could it be that availability is severely limited? Or is it possible, as ZDNet says, that no one wants to view a Web page that takes forever to load on a screen the size of a postage stamp?

BSD Today reports on the latest NetBSD report. This latest offering supports NetBSD on handheld devices with the Hitachi SH3/4 CPU. This means you can now run UNIX on HP’s Jornada and other handheld computers that typicall run WinCE. Also available: NetBSD for Sega Dreamcast.

From a press release at LinuxPR: “Boston, MA, January 17, 2001 — Ximian, the leading open source
desktop company (formerly known as Helix Code), today announced it
has secured $15 million in funding from Charles River Ventures and
Battery Ventures. Formed in late 1999, Ximian is turning the open
source desktop into the industry’s most collaborative and useful
Internet-based tool. Ximian currently has more than 500,000 users, and
is a founding member of the GNOME Foundation advisory board which
includes such industry leaders as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard,
Compaq and IBM.”

ZDNet’s eWEEK loves the latest version of the Linux kernel, but advises users to wait a few months until the major distributions release new versions that incorporate the 2.4.x release.

Wired News reports that UUNet subsidiary Pipex, often cited by anti-spammers as the most persistent source of unsolicited commercial email, was recently innundated with so much of the stuff that it crashed their servers. Spam fighters are celebrating “an ironic bit of payback,” while Pipex blames the attack on “hackers,” preferring to believe that anyone sending that much email posesses “pretty sophisticated hacking skills.”

Know your computing past. It will help you appreciate current technology much, much more. Slashdot readers — at least those old enough to remember the 1980s — share memories of old DEC computers. This trip down memory lane was triggered by coverage of an “nontechnical reminiscence written in 1988” that was penned on the occasion of Columbia University unplugging its last DECSYSTEM-20.

Art Technology released version 5.1 of of its Dynamo application server this morning. In addition to the speed tweaks and Chinese language options now offered, the latest Dynamo now includes “enhanced platform support” for Red Hat 6.2. Get the full story at TechWeb.

ZDNet UK reports on Sun’s new Cobalt line of servers, some selling for less than $1000, all running Linux. Inexpensive servers running Linux won’t cannibalize Sparc and Solaris sales, Sun said with a straight face.