Linux World discusses the world of proprietary compression, the dangers of it, and how to handle many forms of it in Linux.

New Scientist reports on research into Jupiter’s moon Europa, where there is believed to be water and, by extension, the possibility of life.

From LinuxPR: The Linux Professional Institute
announces the live and complete publication of both of its level 1 exams.

Students now taking either exam 101 or 102 will receive immediate pass-fail
results, on exams that have been updated for production testing. Completion
of 101 and 102 are required in order to obtain LPI’s first-level Linux
certification.

Linux.com has a column about Transmeta: “It’s still too early to declare Transmeta as ‘Good,’ ‘Bad,’ or
‘Ugly.’ In the
end, I hope Transmeta can overcome the ramblings of
computer journalists (myself included) to create a truly great
product. Of course, I also hope they’ve learned lessons from
those who came before, like Cyrix, to prevent the same old
mistakes from kicking a good idea squarely between the legs.”

The advisory is at LWN.net: A locally-exploitable security hole was found where a normal user could
trick root running GnoRPM into writing to arbitrary files due to a bug in
the gnorpm tmp file handling.

From Business Wire: Sam Ockman, founder, chairman and CEO of U.S.-based Penguin Computing
Inc., a provider of reliable Linux systems for Internet serving, will deliver a keynote speech, “Global Adoption of Linux and
the Impact on the Global IT Infrastructure: the Vision, the Reality”
at NetWorld + Interop Paris 2000. It’s at
Parc des Expositions de Paris, Porte des Versailles, Paris, France, Nov. 7.

LinuxUser.co.uk posts the program for the LinuxUser 2000 Conference, Dec. 5 to 6 at Chelsea Village, London.

The advisory is at LWN.net: The Red Hat 7.0 dump is being released for Red Hat 6.x and Red Hat 5.x
in order to remove root setuid bits to prevent a known dump
exploit (#20111).

The annoucement is at ZDNet, of course: “ZDNet, part of CNet Networks, has just acquired AppWatch, the premiere Free Software and Open Source announcement and download site. AppWatch stands out for two reasons. First, it tracks only currently maintained Free Software and Open Source software projects.”

From CBS Marketwatch: “Transmeta’s upcoming initial public offering is
suffering a blow as IBM confirmed that it won’t be using the company’s
Crusoe chip in an upcoming laptop model. ‘It does raise a lot of questions and dampen their
IPO,’ noted IPO analyst Tom Taulli.” The Standard supplies another view.