NW Fusion reports that a recent WcAfee virus scan update to Windows NT damages the master boot record and forces the user to reinstall.

Carbon is one of the most amazing technical achievements by Apple in the development of OS X. It was originally brought about by developer reluctance in coding solely for the Cocoa API. Faced with the prospect of a developer revolt, Apple developed Carbon as a solution. So what’s so great about Carbon? Well, the main thing is that it allows developers to get their applications working on OS X with the minimum of effort. This is common knowledge, and many major application vendors should (hopefully) already be in the process of Carbonisation, as they have publicly stated they would be, according to a column at OS Opinion. –Kelly McNeill

CNet reports that the World Wide Web Consortium has a stripped-down
version of its replacement for HTML.

The W3C approved Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) Basic, a subset of
XHTML that backers hope will “impose some discipline on a proliferation of new Web lingos for small computing devices.”

A recent article in MIT’s Technology Review said that the Crusoe chip had put most of the functionality normally expected in hardware into a software layer. With a 128-bit bus, it was consequently capable of running 32-bit Intel applications at a comparable speed to native Intel hardware. A quick examination of the Transmeta site indicates that Technology Review was merely giving a review of what Transmeta had succeeded in doing. Transmeta had succeeded in placing much of the operating functionality of the commonplace or garden variety silicon into software. The column is at OS Opinion. –Kelly McNeill

From CNet: “A new release of the Aimster instant messaging and file-swapping software, expected as soon as
Tuesday evening, will support new plug-ins that could tap into services such as Microsoft’s MSN
Messenger or even Napster’s chat service.”

LinuxToday has a short article on Red Hat releasing the Beta version of Red Hat Linux for
Itanium-based systems. It’s available for public download at Red Hat’s ftp site:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/ia64.

From Fortune.com: “Now there is a wireless
service that meets an even more urgent
need: finding a public toilet.

Covering New York City and ten other
major metropolitan centers, this wee
little download is available to Palm VII
users as Where2Go on www.palm.net, and
to other modem-equipped handhelds as
Bathroom Finder at www.yadayada.com.”

CNet reports on Sendmail’s acquisition of Nascent Techologies, which makes software for accessing email from cell phones or the Web. Read the press release from BusinessWire.

From MSNBC: “MSNBC.com has learned that the hacker who
recently tried to extort CreditCards.com has been at it before.
Another site victimized by the hacker has stepped forward,
telling MSNBC.com it suffered a similar extortion several
months ago. The hacker followed the exact same routine,
demanded $20,000, and used the same e-mail address as the
CreditCards.com hacker. What’s more, the owner of this site
told MSNBC.com the hacker is suspected in more than a dozen
other hacking extortion attempts.”

From LinuxPR:
Andamooka, which provides open support for open content, has added two more
books to its growing library of open content.

Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide, by Ori Pomerantz, teaches
readers how to write modules for the Linux kernel version 2.2. It is geared
toward readers who know C and have written Linux programs.

Linux From Scratch, by Gerard Beekmans, shows how to build a Linux system
directly from the source code included with Linux distributions. Readers will also
learn deeply about Linux and about operating systems in general.