“The Netscape Personal Security Manager (PSM) is a powerful feature. But what if it doesn’t have any security to manage? BugNet has received reports of Netscape 6 users not being able to access secure sites. Testing at KeyLabs isolated the problem–not to a bug in the software, but to a security module missing in some installation downloads.” More information at ZDNet.

In an essay at Multicians.org, datagram inventor Louis Pouzin comments on the creation of the first shell. What started out as something called RUNCOM eventually ended up as Multics.

Versions of Ethereal prior to 0.8.14 are vulnerable to buffer overflows. Full details at LWN.net.

CNET News.com reports that IBM will name lawyer/engineer Harriet P. Pearson as its chief privacy officer. Gartner analyst Bill Malik: “The chief privacy officer is a trend whose time has come.” Slashdot readers discuss the story.

Open CASCADE, which bills itself as “the best industrial Open Source alternative to proprietary 3D modeling kernels,” is now at version 3.1. Free download available from the Open CASCADE Web site or CD-ROM available for purchase.

The ball is now in Napster’s court, according a to a short news brief at ZDNet News. EMusic made good on its promise to scan and identify Napster users trading Emusic tunes, turning in a list of alleged infringers to the download service Wednesday.

A report at LinuxPR announces that London’s RedWire Limited will assume the distribution and technical support duties for Pyramid Computer Systems in the UK and Ireland. The move is expected to strengthen the Linux strategies of both companies.

The LinuxOrbit Newbie test-drives GnuCash, the open source financial software. “Anyone familiar with General Ledger and Journal Voucher entries will feel right at home with this software. GnuCash can handle that load fairly easily.”

Forbes.com weighs in with its accounting of Microsoft’s curious legal strategy during this weeks’ appeal of the antitrust ruling.

IT Reviews recently tested the most recent distributions of Corel, Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, and TurboLinux. “You might think that if the Linux kernel is the same, each distribution will be the same. However, our tests show that nothing could be further from the truth. Each distribution has a particular target audience, and the configuration, including software, manuals and support, varies accordingly.”