Their job is to watch the Linux, Unix and NetWare competition. But some rivals claim that spreading FUD is part of Doug Miller & Co.’s job, too, reports ZDNet.

The Federal Trade Commission has announced a $37.5 million judgment against the operators of at least six Internet pornography sites who billed customers for services they didn’t purchase, reports CNet.

In a surprise move following Wednesday’s release of the patent on the main security algorithm used in digital security products, Baltimore Technologies will offer one of its key developer toolkit products for free from its website. Dublin-based Baltimore, the third-largest company marketing security products following its January merger with U.S.-based CyberTrust, hopes the free availability of the toolkit will encourage developers to incorporate public key cryptography into many more applications, reports Wired.com.

LinuxWorld takes a look at several new products,including VA Linux’s new 4U Database Server, Rave Systems’ SPARC Rackmount Servers, American Megatrends’ new embedded Linux system (called Indium), IBM’s open source Andrew File System (AFS), and Eazel’s Nautilus file manager.

From a column at Upside: “I’m not usually in the business of second-guessing a federal judge, but U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s order that MP3.com pay $25,000 per CD, or as much as $250 million, to Universal Music strikes me as lunacy.”

Inprise/Borland this week announced JBuilder 4, the latest version of its Java-based cross-platform development environment. The JBuilder 4 productivity environment supports EJB 1.1-compliant development on Windows, Linux, and Solaris platforms. The story is at InfoWorld.

Shares of online music provider MP3.com plunged to a new 52-week low in Thursday trading on the Nasdaq, one day after a federal judge ordered it to pay damages of up to $250 million US for copyright infringement, the CBC reports.

BSD Today reviews the two Web mail applications.

Security experts have uncovered a new class of vulnerabilities in Unix and Linux systems that let attackers take full control of computers. These “format string” vulnerabilities started surfacing about two months ago, said Elias Levy, a moderator of the Bugtraq computer security mailing list. Some of them have lurked for years in basic Unix programs, but security experts only now have begun to find and fix them. CNet has more information on the widely reported buffer overflow problems in this story.

From a ZDNet story on Microsoft’s attitude about Linux: “Doug Miller and a few of his colleagues were prowling the halls of the LinuxWorld Expo trade show in San Jose, Calif., a couple weeks ago, poking and prodding the latest tools and gadgets.
What differentiated Miller from the thousands of other geeks doing the same? Miller is a group product manager at Microsoft. One of his primary jobs is to monitor Microsoft’s server operating system competition, especially in the Linux and Unix arenas.”