The Energy Department has awarded Compaq Computer Corp. a $200 million contract to build the largest supercomputer in the world — a system with enough disk space to store 20 times the number of books at the Library of Congress, according to a story at Federal Computer Week.

The White House announced Wednesday that President Clinton will allow Japan’s Nippon Telegraph & Telephone to purchase the U.S. Web hosting company Verio, which had undergone an unusual high-level review due to espionage concerns, according to a story by the Industry Standard. The proposed $5.5 billion deal came under the scrutiny of a federal government national security panel due to concerns about potential spying because NTT, which is majority owned by the Japanese government, could have access to U.S. wiretapping activities.

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said Wednesday that details for a planned review of the FBI computer program designed to capture e-mail messages for criminal investigations will be released Thursday, according to a Reuters story. The Justice Department will post a statement on its Web site at 5 p.m. EDT on Thursday detailing the work and its expectations for the wiretap review, Reno said.

The old-time users of Novell are fed up with all this talk of Linux, TCP/IP, CISCO routers and switches, etc., and they have decided to stick up for themselves, according to this story at the parody site segfault.

Porn sites are generally supporting file-sharing services such as Freenet, according to an IDG story. “It could be a major benefit for us,” says David Schlesinger, VP for Internet marketing at Vivid Video, a leading maker of pornographic videos. “If surfers find a snippet from a movie, it might entice them into buying the whole tape. We can actually turn these shared files into mini-infomercials.”

Executives of both Caldera Systems and the Santa Cruz Operation are assuring SCO Unixware users that the merged company will still support the product, reports ComputerWorld. More at InfoWorld.

TechWeb News looks at the benefits of leasing rather than buying a
SAN.

Network Solutions says it will let accredited registrars offer Internet domains using characters from 55 different languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew, reports ComputerWorld.

UpsideToday’s interview with GNU’s Richard Stallman.

IBM’s $70 answer to Front Page makes site-building and management easy, but it’s not compatible with all Linux distros, from gnulinux.com.