The BBC reports that firms in the UK are being urged to allow staff “occasional
and reasonable” use of personal e-mails as long
as it does not interfere with their work.

From the Register: “Remember how, when Intel announced the upstart USB 2.0 spec
eighteen months ago, it promised we’d be buried by compliant
periipherals in time for Xmas? Well it’s late, but assuredly on its
way.”

Wired.com reports that recent FTC action against the adult Web business may be, as one attorney put it, the beginning of a “clean-up-the-Internet sweep.”

From The Register: “About time too. Borland chose Comdex to sneak out the news that
the Inprise moniker was finally being cast overboard. We imagine
that the relief expressed down at Scotts Valley will have been
enough to generate a small thermal discernable from Las Vegas.”

While dot-com businesses continue to drop like flies, Internet regulators agree on a list of new top-level domains. Registrars — who stand to profit handsomely from new dot-suffixes — say worldwide demand necessitates additional domains. From Wired.com.

Embedded operating systems have become a hot topic lately, with vendors deciding which OS is likely to run the next generation of Internet appliances. IDG.net reports.

Infoworld reports: Intel on Monday will usher in the age of
its NetBurst micro-architecture with the introduction of
the Pentium 4 processor, according to sources for the
Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant.

Infoworld reports: “.info, .biz, .name, .pro, .museum, .coop, and .aero.”

A local root exploit in modutils has been fixed. Details at LWN.net.

From Red Herring.com: On March 14, an innocuous posting on a popular hackers’ Web site ignited a firestorm of
programmer interest. The posting read: “Nullsoft just released an open-source Napster clone.
It does MP3s, movies, and any other format you could want.” A few months earlier, the new
program, called Gnutella, would have gone largely unnoticed, but the David-and-Goliath battle
taking place between the recording industry and Napster, a company that develops a program
for swapping MP3 files, made the posting hot news.