The San Francisco Gate is reporting that Microsoft and Cisco may be using an old law that allows them huge tax breaks, and may not be paying tax as a result.

A story at Inter@ctive Week features Sendmail’s security: “Sendmail is the commercial company formed by the Eric Allman, author in 1981 of sendmail, the open source code mail transport agent while at the University of California at Berkeley. The sendmail server underlies much of the Internet’s mail handling capabilities and is the background mail routing server for the end user email servers in many corporations.”

Australian IT looks at a mini feud between chip makers Intel and Transmeta. “Transmeta says a lot of stuff. So far they haven’t provided any people in the press or
the analyst community with samples of their products,” Intel chief executive Craig Barrett said.

A story at NewsBytes.com quotes an Internet usage study that might be disputed: “When it comes to Web surfing, the Windows series of
operating systems by Microsoft
is still dominant, but a study released today said that
some of the software giant’s competitors are making small advances.

As of Oct. 4, Microsoft’s OS held
a 92.82 percent share of global usage. In second place were what the
study termed ‘other’ operating systems, a group that included Microsoft’s
WebTV, Linux, Sun’s SunOS, Silicon Graphics IRIX, Amiga and IBM’s
OS/2. That group measured a collective 3.9 percent of the worldwide
market. Trailing behind were Apple’s Mac OS, with 2.84 percent, and Unix
with 0.44 percent.”

Inter@ctive Week reports on a federal council established more than a year ago to coordinate governmental law enforcement efforts against “intellectual property theft.” The council “has been hobbled by turf battles, threatening to keep the government hamstrung just as online piracy blossoms, industry critics said.”

Sebastopol, CA — 17,900 lines of densely commented, professionally
written
Java code; coverage of 20 distinct Java APIs (including servlets, JSP,
XML, Swing, and Java 2D); and 164 complete, practical examples make up
the new second edition of bestselling Java author David Flanagan’s
“Java Examples in a Nutshell” (O’Reilly, $29.95).Designed for those who learn best by example, “Java Examples in a
Nutshell” is packed with real-world programs that not only serve as
great learning tools, but can also be modified for individual use.
“Java Examples in a Nutshell” stands-alone as a terrific compilation of
hands-on examples, but it is also an excellent tutorial companion to
“Java in a Nutshell.” Add to that pairing “Java Foundation Classes in a
Nutshell” and “Java Enterprise in a Nutshell” and you have a complete
Java reference library.

“This book was a lot of fun to write,” says Flanagan. “The first
edition came out when Java 1.1 was released at more than double the
size of Java 1.0. While I was busy writing additional examples for the
second edition of “Java in a Nutshell”, the engineers at Sun were busy
turning Java into something that could no longer fit into a nutshell.
We were able to include some examples in “Java in a Nutshell”, but we
had to cut many more than we could include. The decision to create a
book devoted entirely to examples was a good one. Given the freedom to
write an entire book of examples, I was able to go into more depth than
I ever would have before, and write all the examples I really wanted to
write. I found myself really enjoying the exploration and
experimentation that went into developing these examples.”

“Java Examples in a Nutshell” doesn’t hold the readers’ hand or supply
detailed explanations of Java syntax or method calls; it simply
delivers well-commented working examples for exploring the wide range
of what’s possible with Java. Each chapter concludes with programming
exercises that suggest avenues for building further knowledge.

“Java Examples in a Nutshell” includes:

Examples that demonstrate basic Java functionality and the
essential Java APIs, including I/O, threads, networking,
security, reflection, serialization, and security;

Programs that use the graphical user interface and graphics
features of Java, highlighting the Swing, Java 2D, printing,
data
transfer, JavaBeans, and applet APIs;

Examples that illustrate key enterprise APIs in Java,
including remote method invocation (RMI), database
connectivity (JDBC), servlets, JavaServer Pages (JSP), and XML;

An example index that lets users look up a programming concept
or Java class and find any examples in the book that
demonstrate that concept or use that class.

Chapter 19, XML, is available free online at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jenut2/chapter/ch19.html.

The Standard has a story on Scour, a file-trading service like Napster, and its efforts to reposition itself.
“The Michael Ovitz-backed company had to
lay off most of its staff last month after a
copyright infringement lawsuit scared off
investors. Now, Scour has inked a deal
with United Devices, a Softbank-funded
distributed-computing startup, which will
pay Scour to help distribute United
Devices’ free software to the 4 million
people who trade media files with Scour
Exchange.”

Linux World has the first in a series about Linux firewalls: “Security has always been a critical issue for
computer networking, and firewalls are an
essential ingredient for network security. In this
series, I will show you how Linux offers you
freedom of choice in this area. There are many
firewall solutions for Linux. Most are open source applications, but some excellent commercial
products have been ported to Linux. I’ll also show you how the Linux kernel can be used to build a
highly integrated hardware firewall.”

32bitsonline has an article about Accelerated-X laptop displays in Linux. “The last Xi Graphics product I reviewed was their MaXimum CDE (Common
Desktop Environment) Developers Edition. It seemed that the ‘standard’ UNIX
GUI was bolted onto a Linux distribution of nebulous lineage and shoved out the
door to fend for itself among the heavyweights from Redhat, TurboLinux and
SUSE. The result was less than satisfying.

Thankfully, this has changed. As far as I can tell, the Xi Graphics folks are no
longer in the Linux Distribution business. It pays to stay with what you know –
and there is no one in the display server business that is as fast to market with
new drivers for the Linux and BSD crowd than Xi Graphics.”

eWeek has a followup story on Rijndael being proposed as the U.S. government encryption standard.