New Scientist takes on this week’s WorldNet Daily “report,” which stated that Saddam Hussein is snatching up PlayStation 2 consoles for his war effort: “”If I was going to do this right now, I’d buy Sega Dreamcasts.
They already have a high speed link you could use and they run
Linux which allows you to run multiple processors.”

“IBackup, a division of Pro Softnet Corp., has released a
Java-based online backup scheduler called Smart-IB Plus with compression and incremental backup features for the Linux/Unix platforms in addition to the
Windows version.
Now users of IBackup can schedule unattended backups at pre-specified times at regular intervals from their PC desktops or Linux and other Unix variants
including Solaris machines onto their IBackup account spaces.” More information can be found in the press release at Business Wire.

News.com reports that the first desktop-ready operating system ready to run on Intel’s new chip will be a Linux distribution.

From Business Wire: “Red Hat (Nasdaq:RHAT), a leader in developing, deploying and managing open source Internet infrastructure, today introduced the SID project, an open source
hardware simulation framework for embedded developers. This package consists of software components interacting with each other to imitate the behavior of
physical hardware before its actual creation.”

Slashdot readers discuss O’Reilly’s latest article from Perl guru Nathan Torkington, “What every Perl programmer needs to know about .NET.”

Robert LeBlanc was part of the original team that evaluated Linux, the open source movement and decided that this was where IBM should be. IBM’s recently announced billion dollar fund is proof that IBM is serious about Linux. Here, Mr. Robert LeBlanc talks about a variety of issues including the reasons for choosing Linux, the status of Monterey and the release of AIX code into the open source community.

Interview on FreeOS.com–Mayank

From SecurityFocus: “Unchecked buffers exist in a particular handler for URL requests that
begin with two dots “..”. Depending on the data entered into the buffer,
WebLogic Server could be forced to crash or arbitrary code could be
executed on the system in the security context of the web server. In
the event that random data was sent in order to crash the server,
restarting the application would be required in order to regain normal
functionality.”

The press release sings praises of this handheld device, which is supposed to be not only a (copy-protected) eBook reader and multimedia player, but also a PDA, and talks of how thousands of developers are already writing software for it, and about its compatibility with Red Hat 6.1, and so on. (NewsForge editors, being kindly souls heavily imbued with the Solstice Holiday spirit, will not speculate about what percentage of those developers are working harder on cracking the device’s copy protection scheme than on developing apps for the thing.)

“Jabber Platform Brings Instant Messaging to Wireless and Mobile Computing Devices,” is the subtitle of ths brassy press release.

Eavesdrop on a Slashdot discussion (that has hundreds of posts, so it may take a while to download) about this ZDNet article and its contention that Linux must “become less overwhelming in order to capture the desktop.”