Here’s some scary news. Reuters is reporting that computer
security gaps at the Federal Aviation Administration
air traffic control put air traffice control at risk
of potential electronic attack.
The General Accounting
Office found “serious and pervasive
problems” in all areas policed by the FAA. More from ABC News.

UnionBuiltBox has been evaluated by the IT staff of the AFL-CIO in
Washington, D.C., and its computers have been approved for sale on the WorkingFamilies
network set up by union privilege of the AFL-CIO. The press release resides at LinuxPR.

From an InfoWorld story: “Although Linux is ever gaining more supporters, its status as a truly open-source operating system is not assured, industry pundit Nicholas Petreley said Wednesday in a keynote address at the NetWorld+Interop 2000 show. Linux is endangered by the popularity of the businesses formed to sell and service it, he said. Red Hat, Caldera Systems, TurboLinux, and other Linux vendors can potentially stifle its development by packaging a single standard for the OS, he said.”

“When we announced our ongoing development of the PostgreSQL Enterprise
Replication Server (eRServer) last month I had no idea how great the interest
and demand for this would be.” states CEO Geoff Davidson. “We have received
dozens of inquiries from customers, competitors, and development companies
asking for more information. Today I’m very pleased to announce that the first
prerelease version of eRServer has been delivered for testing.” That’s from the press release at LinuxPR.

This Salon.com article, with the writer drooling over a $12,000-a-day “educated escort” has a tenuous connection to Open Source, but a small one: The escort in question “used IP [Internet Protocol] in a sentence!!!
Now that is just super-sexy. I start to think that she could go
very far with this new site she’s planning. Imagine this: She puts
her site on her own server, and then does a seminar at a
conference called “Linux and the Lady: How a self-managed
escort used Linux servers to keep from going down too often.”

Linux Planet has a column about one man’s difficulties hooking up a cable modem with Linux. Read more of the sad story.

Several sites are reporting on Corel’s third-quarter loss of $10.7 million. The consensus: It’s good news compared to the $23.6 million loss in Q2. Maximum Linux has the story. More from Reuters.

Los Angeles, Calif, – Sept. 27, 2000 — “Five years ago, search engines seemed like the Web’s salvation today they need some saviors of their own.” That was Lisa Guernsey writing in the New York Times last June, and after reading that I knew that we were on to something. Because six months earlier we had assembled a team and gave them the assignment of building the web’s largest index directory of information about parenting, and issues related to young children. We named it KinderStart.com link utilized Linux-based design code with a MYSQL database, PERL and PHP, designed it to function as a “vortal” or vertical search-engine, and launched it in August 2000. What exactly is a vortal and what does it do? First, let me backtrack a bit.

In 1995 there were 1.5 million web pages. Today there are more than
1 billion with an additional 1 million being added every day. All that information spells trouble for the typical search engine (which tends to answer the simplest query with thousands of answers) not to mention the typical web-user who must find a way to navigate this overwhelming flood of information. That’s where “verticality” comes in.

When we started work on KinderStart.com we were typical parents with lots of questions about how to raise our 3 year-old son Matthew – when should he go to the dentist, is he just hyper or hyper-active or ADD, are his vaccines safe, when can he play soccer, is that a blotch a bruise or a birthmark? You get the picture. Trouble was, if we utilized the Internet to answer those questions we spent a whole lot of time going nowhere. That’s why we created a customized search engine that doesn’t promise caregivers and parents the world, just the world of information about kids seven years and under.

That’s what verticality is all about, and that’s why KinderStart.com is the focused, easy to use search-engine for answers to your parenting questions. Got Kids? Need Instructions? Go to: KinderStart.com.

— Submitted by Robert DeFulgentiis

IBM’s global services division will add hosted storage and storage management to its portfolio, reports TechWeb News, hoping to establish itself in the IT-on-demand market through its systems expertise.

ZDNet UK News reports, a UK company, dubbed FreeBox, claims it will bridge the digital divide in its ambitious plan to provide every house in Britain with a free set-top box to access digital television channels and the Internet.