Info World reports on the emerging potential of HTML email…for spammers. The article reports on the potential to plant bugs – in the listening-in sense – in HTML email messages possibly allowing spammers to track their recipients. On the flip side, it also allows recipients to track the senders of the unwelcome email.

TechWeb has an editorial discussing why companies are opting for Open Source instead of more conventional proprietary models.

The Register is reporting that “mafiaboy”, a 15 year old arrested in connection with this year’s distributed denial of service attacks against several large companies, is threatening to reveal the software he used to bring down the corporate networks in court, in an effort to avoid jail time.

TechWeb reports on the deployment of Linux-based cash register. At the moment, some 40% of cash registers run on DOS and an additional 33% run on some form of Windows.

From Business Wire:

Interphase Corporation (Nasdaq:INPH), a leader in Fibre Channel and next generation telecommunications technologies, announced the
availability of its 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter with advanced clustering capabilities.
The Interphase PowerSAN 5560 HBA comes with the newest version of the PowerSAN device driver and was designed to complement
both open source Linux and Microsoft cluster environments.

ZDNet announces two new books in the “Embedded Linux Quick Reference Guide” series.

EE Times reports on
Verisity Design releasing a
new version of its SureLint Verilog linting tool that supports
user-defined checks, better Finite State Machine and race
condition checks, and improved checks compliant with the
Reuse Methodology Manual. SureLint runs on Linux and Unix.

A story at InfoWorld has Michael Lambert, v.p. of Dell’s enterprise systems group as saying the company is devoted to Microsoft. “Linux is strong in our application space, but Windows will continue to be the predominant [operating system].”

Bloomberg News (on CNet) reports that Toshiba, the world’s top laptop maker, hasn’t decided whether to use Transmeta’s Crusoe
chips in its notebooks.

From PR Newswire: VMware, Inc. announced today the
formation of its Preferred Hardware Partner Program. Founding partners in the
program include Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE: CPQ), Dell, IBM (NYSE: IBM), and
VA Linux Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: LNUX). (VA Linux owns NewsForge.)