The embattled Internet music-swapping service
Napster announced Thursday it has hired the chief policy adviser to Sen. Orrin
Hatch, R-Utah, as its vice president for corporate and policy development. From Florida Today.

MSNBC reports that Bill Gates summoned
some of the world’s top technology minds to
Microsoft headquarters Thursday, as the
company hosted a conference on the touchy
issue of online privacy. The two-day summit,
with wide-open conversations that have at times
been heated, is designed to help e-commerce
companies iron out their differences with
consumers over privacy issues.

LinuxPR: “Fox on Linux is the latest in commercial Linux applications, providing
businesses with a sophisticated, graphical, proven software package to deal
with their core financial accounting needs.”

From Linuxworld: In the third installment of Joshua Drake’s look at the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), the Geek discusses configuring CUPS via the KDE/QT interfaces.

Newsforge reader MetaDot writes to tell us that release version 2.5.2 of the MetaDot portal server is now available.Threaded Discussion Board – The discussion board now has the capability of sorting by date and displaying messages in a threaded view.
Special Thanks to a Loyal Fan and Contributor: Rizen (jt@anarchyink.com)

Gizmo Plugable Architecture – The Gizmo architecture is now designed so that new Gizmos can be built and dropped into the Gizmo directory for addition to the My Page tool menus.

Object Oriented Userchannel.pl – The name says it all! Once you upgrade, be sure to install the metadotd.pl daemon or else….

Debug Message Improvement – Debug message logging can now be redirected to a log file by enabling the commented out log file reference. Debug info will not appear in the HTML, but will appear in the debug log file.

Download it here.

In an effort to get ahead in the PDA market, Microsoft is seeking for Palm developers to defect. MSNBC has the story.

IDG Net reports that Hitachi has announced that “it has begun shipping a Transmeta Crusoe-based Internet appliance in Japan.”

Linux Devices is carrying a report on the use of Linux in German industry.

Info World reports that Infineon and IBM are planning to build magnetic, rather then electric-charge based RAM, potentially allowing boots to be waived.

Reuters reports (through ZDNet) on solar-powered advertising-paid Internet connections in some Berlin bus shelters.