LinuxWorld challenges Napster supporters to revise their arguments.

ZDNet analyzes a Which? study on British opinions of the internet. The study finds 1/4 of the British population do not want to be part of the internet revolution.

ZDNet cites a study on the growth of the internet, which found an estimated 304 million regular users (about 1 in every 20 people on Earth) and 2 billion web pages. The internet is moving overseas, adds the story, as people world wide log on.

A former Intel engineer is facing charges of insider trading. ZDNet has more.

SFPress contemplates the future of the virus as more and more technologies become based on shared data.

A report by Eric Murray was released this week based on the results of a random sample of over 8000 secure web servers. Surprisingly, only two thirds of sites surveyed were found to have adequate (“strong”) encryption. Eric defined strong sites as those that support TLS v1 or SSL v3, support 128 bit ciphers, and have valid non-expired third-party certificates, reports Apache Week.

Embedded Linux developer Lineo Inc. has released for beta testing RTnet, a modification to the Linux networking subsystem that permits embedded devices to communicate in hard real time using Internet protocols over Ethernet. According to the company, this represents the first time that such communications have been possible using nonproprietary operating systems. The story is at SDTimes.

Slashdot readers discuss cease-and desist-orders apparently sent to several people who have written Linux drivers and apps relating to a free barcode scanner.

From a Wired.com story about chatbot Biz: “Biz is based on Jason Hutchens’ MegaHal, the 1998 runner-up in the Loebner Prize, a version of the Turing Test that every year attempts to find the most convincingly “human,” chattering robot. Hutchens said that since he released MegaHal under the GNU public license, it has been downloaded thousands of times. It is also included in every copy of Debian’s distribution of Linux, and has been converted to the Mac, BeOS, and Amiga.”

From a Wired.com story about tech stock prices: VA Linux (LNUX) continues to charge back up, gaining another 4 11/16 to 59 11/16, Hewlett-Packard (HWP) gained 4 39/64 to 125 1/4, Lexmark (LXK) was up 2 43/256 to 70, and Apple (AAPL) was up 2 1/2 to 63 7/16. Palm Computing (PALM) fell 1 1/8 to 42 7/8 and Dell (DELL) lost 9/16 to 33 13/16. (Full disclosure: VA Linux owns NewsForge.)