CNet reports that online music Riffage.com has pulled the plug on its services after an unsuccessful hunt for a
buyer.

“The company was among the most creative of the online music start-ups, buying an offline, independent music label and San Francisco’s
venerable Great American Music Hall venue in an attempt to diversify its business.”

Dr. Dobb’s Journal interviews Theo de Raadt, principal architect of OpenBSD. “The biggest thing is to keep on improving quality and make everything work better. Device drivers
are also becoming an issue, people need those more. We’re working a lot on laptop issues like
WaveLAN, which works fine now, and on PCMCIA card, APM, laptop suspend … sound cards are
going to become a big concern soon.”

Linux Planet speaks out on theKompany’s release of the source code to Kivio for use by the KDE project. Will freeloaders in the Open Source community ruin the act of trust?

From BSD Today: “OpenBSD has announced a security fix for two problems that were discovered in KerberosIV code.
According to a posting to the OpenBSD security announcements list, a symlink problem was
discovered which makes it possible for a local user to overwrite any file on the local machine if you
have enabled KerberosIV in /etc/kerberosIV/krb.conf. And, if you use telnetd and you accept insecure
cleartext passwords, the announcement says, special environment variables may be set on the remote
side.”

Posted at LWN.net: “his email is here to announce the availability of a port of ORBit (the
GNOME ORB) to the Linux kernel. This ORB, named kORBit, is available from
our sourceforge web site (http://korbit.sourceforge.net/). A kernel ORB
allows you to write kernel extensions in CORBA and have the kernel call
into them, or to call into the kernel through CORBA.”

Upside puts Transmeta on trial for unloading bad chips on hardware makers. “Of greatest interest to the court is the issue of intent, for the charges assume a certain
malice of forethought on the part of Transmeta. As one juror noted, ‘I’m sure Transmeta did not intend
to foist bad technology on its customers.’ The court concurs.
I therefore find Transmeta not guilty of all charges. However, the court will be watching future
products carefully.”

The San Jose Mercury News has a column on a site called Internet Wasteland, and Red Hat gets a mention: ”
Or how about software maker Red Hat Inc., one of the most sought-after stocks a year ago when the Linux operating
system was on everyone’s lips? Red Hat has dropped 96 percent since then.”

The San Jose Mercury News reports on the new rage for using your idle computer’s power: protein research. And you can use your Linux machine, not just Windows.

MacWeek asked developers how to save Apple. “Stalker Software president Vladimir Butenko believes that OS X has the potential to become ‘the first Unix system for the
masses–something that Linux fans dream about.’ However, he thinks that Apple needs intelligent marketing to
emphasize the strengths of the underlying technology.”

Forbes.com reviews the Hitachi Flora-ie 55mi Internet appliance, which “looks like an LCD
(liquid crystal display) screen
broken off a laptop. The screen is
touch-sensitive, and users can
browse the Web and check e-mail
using pen input similar to those on
much smaller PalmPilot or Windows
CE devices.

This dopey-looking Net appliance is, however, far brawnier than a
PalmPilot and should be well suited to Web-browsing. Running the
Linux operating system, it can connect to the Web via modem, a
wireless local area network or a cell phone. The Flora has 128
megabytes of flash ROM and 192 megabytes of RAM. And its 400
megahertz Crusoe chip runs on very low power, extending the device’s
battery power to seven hours.” More from IDG News Service.