CNet reports on plans by country-music company Fahrenheit Entertainment said to sell copy-protected CDs by early next year using
encryption technology from SunnComm, a little-known company based in Phoenix.

The Standard has a feature on Aimster and its founder Johnny Deep, a consultant from upstate New York.

Byte.com has a column about experiences with Slackware and Red Hat, and the writer talks about hardware recognition for
each.

Wired.com reports that a federal judge has prohibited a Web hosting firm from using Register.com’s Whois database to spam users with a phone and e-mail marketing campaign.

“Google’s new toolbar extension may give Web surfers the feeling they’re being watched. That’s because one version of Google’s toolbar keeps track of every site a person visits to analyze search and surfing patterns.” The story’s at CNet.

From LinuxPR: PyBiz today announced a change of policy that makes the use of XDisect, their
high-speed XML indexing and search engine free during the development phase
of customer projects. See.: http://www.pybiz.com/news, Additional information
can be obtained by contacting eval@pybiz.com

PyBiz had been working with pilot customers for evaluation of its XDisect
product in an enterprise environment. The December release of XDisect has
been greatly improved as a result of incorporating this valuable customer
feedback.

CNet reports: “Open-source software developers hoping to create a free replacement for the MP3 technology are pushing ahead with their project
after the collapse of their parent, Webcasting start-up iCast.

For the last few months of its existence, CMGI’s iCast was the official home of the colorfully named Ogg Vorbis project, an attempt to create
a digital music compression format that would sound as good as or better than the MP3 format but lack prohibitive license fees.”

From LinuxPR: Easy Software Products today
announced the 2.2 release of the ESP Package Manager, a
cross-platform software distribution program for UNIX.

EPM v2.2 adds new HTML documentation, adds wildcard support in list files,
enhances the setup GUI, and fixes some small portability bugs. The new release
is available on-line at:

http://www.easysw.com/epm.

At LinuxPR: Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW)
today announced Forte for Java, release 2.0, the latest version of the company’s
leading cross-platform development environment for building Internet
services-based applications. Forte for Java, release 2.0 includes several new
plug-in modules that make it easy for Java developers to build data-centric
Internet applications.

BSD Today has an article on creating a firewall with ipfw and routing your internal private IP network through it onto the Internet.