James Simmons is the creator and maintainer of linuxmafia.org, which has been around for about three years. Chances are that if you use slackware, you know about linuxmafia.org. James Simmons has donated a huge amount of his free time and resources in putting together this website and maintaining it. In this interview I sit down with James for a candid irc interview about his current plans for LM and where he sees things going, and his opinions on various other topics. See the interview at userlocal.com. –keskoy

Slashdotters discuss a letter to the KDE community explaining the reasoning behind the KDE League.

The Register warns that many company networks are compromised, not by shortcomings in security on the part of admins, but rather by employees within the network putting their own systems on the network or doing other things which could lead to compromises.

InfoWorld reports that the European Union is stepping up its legal case against the American software giant, Microsoft.

CBS reports that US Republican House leader Dick Armey says the Department of Justice insured a positive report of the FBI’s Carnivore email reading software, further raising questions about the report’s legitimacy.

MSNBC warns that the price of flat panel monitors is dropping, and in a few years’ time may actually be available at a reasonable price. The advice is to hold off until then to buy the light-weight, high-resolution monitors.

Linux Journal is carrying an essay on the effect of the Internet on China, and leads to conclusions that may surprise some readers.

Anandtech looks at the video card industry and its plans for 2001.

The author of the enormously popular freeware network tool PING, Mike Muuss, died in a Maryland car crash last night. The accident happened at 9.30pm (New York time) on route 95 as a result of a previous accident. Mike hit a car stuck in the middle of the road and was pushed into the path of an oncoming tractor.” Full report at The Register.

The Duke of URL reviews BestLinux 2000: “The question, is BestLinux just another clone of RedHat or does it add something that has been missing and fills a need in the community, in this case better language support? Do we really need another distribution to fill this need?”