“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.

ABCNews.com has a feature on TiVo: “TiVo’s actually more than a consumer appliance. It’s one of
the first true integrations of computers and TVs. Under the
hood, it’s a PowerPC-based computer running the Linux
operating system. Video is stored in a variant of the popular
MPEG computer video compression scheme.”

From LinuxPR: The KDevelop Team today announced
the release of KDevelop 1.3, a powerful, easy to use, Integrated Development
Environment for the C and C++ Programming Language based on KDE.
KDevelop 1.3 is a major update release that follows the successful versions 1.1
and 1.2 to enable developers for rapid application development for the new KDE
2.0 Desktop. KDevelop is the work of an international team dedicated in
providing an IDE under the Linux and UNIX operating systems, their freely
available product is known to be stable and improving productivity for any C/C++
developer.

From a CNBC.com column: “Microsoft could, in fact, co-opt the open-source movement the way
it co-opted the Web-browser business — after it found that its
proprietary online technologies couldn’t compete with the Internet
formats that Netscape was popularizing.”

The RSS-DEV Working Group has released RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0. RSS is the most prominent format for information/news feeds. –ftobin