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.)

From a CNet story: “As music-swapping company Napster and the record industry skirmish in court, a bevy of technology companies are coming out with ideas they say can help the two sides settle their legal disputes. Settling lawsuits that could define an industry won’t be that simple, of course. But analysts say a few of the technologies emerging do show some promise for bridging what has appeared to be an insurmountable gap between file-trading start-ups and a music industry loathe to lose control of its copyrights online.”

From Alan Cox via LWN.net: “Since 2.2.17 isn’t out yet I’ve released 2.2.18pre2 versus 2.2.17pre20. So
you need to grab 2.2.16 then apply the 2.2.17pre20 patch then the 2.2.18pre
patch of choice. Ok 2.2.18pre2 merges the large stuff that doesnt interfere with other parts
of the kernel and some small fixes that are needed. Microcode.c also now
compiles correctly. Pretty much all of this is stuff vendors are already
shipping so while it is experimental (paticularly some of the USB) it
shouldn’t impact mainstream code. The AGP/DRM stuff is 2.4 compatible and
works out of the box with the same Xserver setup on the i810 as on 2.4.” Read more.

AMIRIX Systems Inc. has released a new Open Source configuration tool for embedded Linux systems. Amirix is a sponsor of the non-commercial “Embedded Debian Project” whose goal is to create a completely open, multi-vendor embedded Linux software resource based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The
press release is at LinuxPR.

CTitek Inc. has developed a Linux technical support Web site at www.FixMyLinux.com. FixMyLinux.com is designed to support the Linux Community by making Linux easy to use. The press release is at LinuxPR.

The problem: The dynamic linker ld.so uses several environment variables like LD_PRELOAD
and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to load additional libraries or modify the library
search path. It is unsafe to accept arbitrary user specified values
of these variables when executing setuid applications, so ld.so handles
them specially in setuid programs and also removes them from the
environment. The
update is at LWN.net.

A class-action was filed Thursday on behalf of Emulex shareholders who sold common stock or call options or bought put options based on information contained in a hoax press release. The lawsuit was filed against Internet Wire, which published the press release at its Web site, and Bloomberg, a news wire that wrote stories based on the hoax information, InfoWorld reports.

RadiSys Corp., a designer and manufacturer of building blocks enabling next-generation Internet and communications systems, has signed a partnership agreement with MontaVista Software Inc., a developer of the Hard Hat Linux operating system for embedded applications, to promote the Linux operating system on RadiSys’ embedded solutions. The full
press release is at LinuxPR.