From The Associated Press: “In a ruling that challenges online anonymity, a Florida appeals court declared Monday
that Internet service providers must divulge the identities of people who post defamatory
messages on the Internet.

Critics of the ruling say it could have a chilling effect on free expression in Internet chat rooms.”

From Linux PR:
Sun Wah Hi-Tech Group
has announced in Shenzhen it has become a strategic shareholder of
RedFlag Software Co. Ltd. to promote the homegrown
software and OS industry internationally.

eWeek says the successes of Linux, not its failures, may have contributed to several delays in the 2.4 kernel, which may not be ready this year.

Fairfax IT reports that Students at Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing have constructed an interactive map of the universe in just three months, using a Compaq supercomputer running Unix.

ZDNet reports on Sony’s release of its VAIO laptop, powered by the Transmeta Crusoe chip. The Register compares the VAIO to an iMac, saying its aimed at “laptop fashion victims.”

OPP Version 0.2.5 features vastly improved thread and internet components,
freely available under the terms of the GNU LGPL (Library GNU Public
License), according to a press release at Linux PR.

The advisory is at LWN.net: “The security problem in the traceroute program as shipped with SuSE
Linux distributions is completely different from the one reported on
security mailing lists a few days ago (`traceroute -g 1 -g 1′) by
Pekka Savola . SuSE distributions do not contain
this particular traceroute implementation.
The problem in our traceroute was discovered independently and reported
to us by H D Moore . The problem in the
implementation of traceroute that we ship is a format string parsing
bug in a routine that can be used to terminate a line in traceroute’s
output to easily embed the program in cgi scripts as used for web
frontends for traceroute.” Here’s an update.

Beginning with the November 2000 classes in Linux Systems Administration,
LearnLinux will give the LPI (Linux Professional Institute) Certification exam
at the conclusion of the five day SysAdmin Level I and Level II classes. The press release is at Linux PR.

A columnist at SecurityPortal says: “In my time as a
Security Administrator for a Solaris shop,
I had to give the occasional briefing to
my boss: We’re vulnerable. A new
security hole has just been discovered
and every major Unix/Linux is vulnerable,
from Solaris to Irix to Red Hat Linux.
After briefing my boss on our risk and my
plans to do something about such, he asks me the same question: ‘Can you find
an exploit?’ Rather often, I’ve had to answer, ‘nope.’ ”

From a column at KDE Dot News: “Ideally,
even though OpenOffice is technically a competitor to KOffice (Sun
apparently denies this) and despite the naysayers, OpenOffice will be of
sizable benefit to KDE.”