The Standard reports on Gateway’s failed attempts to move beyond selling computers, and suggests the company sticks to what it has succeeded in doing until now.

Fairfax IT gives its spin on the passed year from a decidedly Australian perspective.

SearchEnterpriseLinux: “The year 2000 was the year for weddings and a rosy afterglow as major systems vendors embraced Linux. In 2001, the real work of making those marriages work begins in earnest.” -Anonymous Reader

From The Register: “Mobile phone companies and manufacturers are to be served with billion-dollar lawsuits from US brain tumour victims, according to The Times. The cases are being brought forward by the same legal firm that won record damages from the tobacco industry for smokers with lung cancer.”

“If there’s a rumor floating round that I’ll do any damn thing to my computer that anyone suggests, I’d be hard pressed this week to offer evidence to dispel it. That’s because for a little over a week now, all the buzz in KDE circles has been a series of hacks designed to enable the text anti-aliasing provided, sort of, in XFree86-4.02. The KDE mailing lists were bursting with delighted testimonials from persons who had gotten this marvel running. Okay, I thought, I’ll bite.” Full story at LinuxPlanet.

TechWeb reports: “Despite the company’s slumping stock price, Red Hat CEO and president Matthew Szulik expects partners to get squarely behind the Linux software company, so much so that they will tip the balance of software sales generated by the company to third parties.”

CNET News.com takes a look back at this year’s leading privacy issues.

“Linux is currently going through the same stages the Internet did. It started off as a geeks-only area, but some very smart companies — IBM and so forth — saw the potential for the OS, just like very smart companies — Netscape — saw the potential for the Internet. These companies are the ones that are going to bring Linux to the home user. This business method has much in common with those early adopters that brought the Internet to the home user. Linux will become easier to use because, like the early days of the Internet, the difficulty in using it turned off a lot of people.” –Kelly McNeill

Wired News reports: “Online news sites are turning to a novel way to make some extra cash: requiring fees for links. The Albuquerque Journal charges $50 for the right to link to each of its articles. Localbusiness.com and Latino.com are more generous, and permit one to five links without payment. There’s just one catch. Legal experts say no U.S. law or court decision allows a website to successfully demand payment for links to its content.”

TurboLinux has released a security advisory for fetchmail-5-5.0-2 and earlier versions. “The updated IMAP server released in errata advisory RHSA:102-04 exposes a bug in fetchmail’s
implementation of the AUTHENTICATE GSSAPI command.” Details and patches available at LinuxToday.