Dave’s most recent couple of Scripting News pieces are great – and almost unclassifiable for us. They could be under “Humor” almost as easily as under “Internet.”

Microsoft Word documents published on the Internet have the ability to tell their creator who is reading them. The Privacy Foundation is concerned about possible nefarious or invasive uses of this feature.

From a review by the dukeofurl.com: “There’s a whole lot of Linux going on lately. It seems everyone and their dog has their own Linux distribution these days, so why not Abit? If you’re not familiar with Abit, Abit is a motherboard manufacturer based in Taiwan who is known for their excellent overclocking boards, and even as of late, for their rock-solid stability. Can Gentus do the same?”

Penguin Computing Inc., a provider of reliable Linux systems for Internet serving, and Bramasol Inc., an SAP America, Inc. Certified Business Solution Provider in the western United States, have announced that Penguin Computing has become one of the first Linux companies in the U.S. to implement and use an SAP solution in production on Linux. The implementation of mySAP.comTM solutions provides significant benefits to Penguin Computing and its customers, underscoring the commitment from SAP to satisfy the needs of small and mid-sized companies. The press release is at LinuxPR.

The version of X-Chat that was distributed with Debian GNU/Linux 2.2
has a vulnerability in the URL handling code: when a user clicks on
a URL X-Chat will start netscape to view its target. However it
did not check the URL for shell metacharacters, and this could be
abused to trick xchat into executing arbitraty commands. This has been fixed in version 1.4.3-0.1, and we recommend you
upgrade your xchat package(s) immediately. The full advisory is at LWN.net. (This problem affects all X-Chat users, regardless of distribution.)

From a review at securityportal: “I wanted to write a really positive article about Debian 2.2, which was just released a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I can’t. While Debian itself is a reasonably well-done Linux distribution, it has some major security issues.”

LWN.net interviews Guy “Bud” Tribble, vice president of engineering for Eazel.

Upside.com has a story about Linux Capital Group Inc., a startup dedicated to getting other startups to market. “At first, the timing seemed too good to be true. With the sky-high December valuations on dotcom incubator companies such as CMGI (CMGI) and Internet Capital Group (ICGE), and suddenly Linux Capital Group looked like a can’t-miss prospect.”

VA Linux rolled out a four-way 700MHz Pentium III-based system that company officials promised will be targeted at users looking to speed e-commerce or Web serving applications, reports Infoworld.com. The new model 4450, which can be rack-mounted in a 4-unit, or 7-inches-high form factor, features three independent PCI buses, 64-bit PCI card slots, and a 66MHz PCI bus, which helps quicken RAID and Gigabit Ethernet performance. The system can be set up to hold five 36-gigabyte hard drives. (Full disclosure: VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

The Palm virus threat was short-lived and few users were affected by the destructive software, which unlike a computer virus does not reproduce, reports LATimes.com. But the minimal impact of the Trojan horse masks future danger, ZDNet UK says.