Campus police confiscated an Oklahoma State University student’s computer after
the Recording Industry Association of America notified the school that a person on campus
was allegedly distributing copyrighted material. CNet has the story .

From an announcement at LWN.net: “Debian is phasing out support for Debian 2.1 (slink). We believe that
this will have a minimal impact on our user community as we expect that
most slink users have already upgraded to potato. In order to ease the
transition for those who have not yet upgraded, we will provide minimal
support until Sep 30, 2000.”

The nation’s government-funded
computer security watchdog issued a warning
Friday that computer intruders have taken control
of hundreds of computers connected to the
Internet. The attackers are in a position to launch a
serious attack, according to the CERT
Coordination Center, which said that the situation
“poses a significant threat to Internet sites and the
Internet infrastructure.”

Computer vandals are exploiting two fairly
common vulnerabilities in Unix computer systems discovered
since July. In about 100 cases since then, intruders have used
the vulnerabilities to install distributed denial-of-service tools
on machines, according to CERT Incident Response Team
Leader Kevin Houle. The story is at MSNBC.

“Still knocking bugs out,” Cox says in an email published on LWN.net.

MSN is overbilling
subscribers by hundreds or thousands of dollars
for what is supposed to be a $21 monthly fee,
MSNBC.com has learned. MSN has not,
however, issued a general warning about the
glitch, opting instead to handle irate customer
service calls on a case-by-case basis. The report is at MSNBC (yes, the MS stands for Microsoft at MSNBC, too).

LinuxBoxen.com, a division
of Unified Consulting, Inc., has launched its new e-commerce site, , offering customers hardware components bundled with Open-Source Linux
drivers and software. Read the press release at LinuxPR.

The RIAA has appointed Bruce Block, formerly the chief technology officer and vice president of business development for Musicmaker.com, as its senior vice president of technology. The press release is at the RIAA’s Web site.

The Street was mixed in its reaction to Red Hat’s
second quarter Friday; the company got a downgrade
from ABN AMRO, while other analysts were neutral on
its results.

Shares in the Linux operating system distributor were
down 2 to 23.25, or 8 percent. There had been some
execution worries for the company after its CFO
departed in July, reports ZDNet. More from CBS Marketwatch.

Punk band Offspring said Friday it will give away a new album on the Web, hitting asour note with a recording industry fighting a landmark copyright case against Internet song-swap service Napster Inc. Offspring’s strategy directly contradicts the recording industry’s argument that Napster’s technology is hurting salesby enabling fans to get music for free. Reuters has the story.

KDE has announced that 1.94 “Kandidat,” the fifth and final beta preview of Kopernicus, has been released. Slashdot readers discuss the news. The press release is at LinuxPR.