NewsFactor Network writes: “Japanese customers recently complained so vociferously about Xbox video-game consoles scratching the edges of discs played in them that Microsoft had to post a public apology on its Japanese Web site. But the defects — which Microsoft said yesterday involve “significantly less than 1 percent of systems sold” in Japan — may not be the biggest problem the company faces in trying to crack one of the most important video-game markets. The most daunting problem for Xbox could be the lukewarm reception it has received since it launched two weeks ago on the home turf of competitors Sony and Nintendo.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “The EFF has taken the bnetd v. Blizzard case. LawMeme has the story.”

Yahoo: “AOL Time Warner has hired software firm Red Hat Inc to convert some of its computer systems to the open-source Linux operating system, according to sources close to talks between the two companies.” This story doesn’t mention that the Red Hat/AOL talks were first reported at NewsForge.

Gaudenz Alder writes: “JGraph 1.0 is now available with full documentation. With this final release, the open-source component offers a 100 % stable, fully standards-compliant API to display and edit graphs (networks). JGraph is already known for its outstanding quality and performance, and this release continues the tradition with a wealth of features at a surprising small size of 130 K! JGraph integrates nicely into the Swing component class hierarchy and supports drag and drop, clipboard, history, zoom, layering, grouping, editing, and much more. Visit the JGraph website at http://www.jgraph.com/“

Dejected @Work writes “For anyone thinking that porting from Solaris to Linux is easy just because they’re both based on Unix, think again. IBMs eServer Developer Domain released this porting guide designed to assist in porting a Solaris application to Linux. It highlights some quirks along with an article on reasons to port to Linux.”

Mozilla 0.9.9 is out. MozillaQuest Magazinereports: “AOL-Netscape’s Mozilla Organization released the Milestone 0.9.9 edition of its Mozilla browser suite today — ten days behind schedule…. Mozilla 0.9.9 is the last planned milestone before the scheduled April 2002 Mozilla 1.0 release.”

sPiNe writes “A while ago BSDFreaks.nl was created to help newbies and assist freaks with all their BSD related problems. This portal site for BSD users is in dutch and contains news items, howtos, links and reviews. With its own irc channel and board it could become a huge knowledge base for BSD users. Check it out ! www.BSDFreaks.nl“

From PC World: “A production version of the free GNU operating system is likely to be available by the end of this year, according to the
president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF).

“We actually have the GNU kernel working, and we can now produce the GNU system, as opposed to the GNU/Linux system that people have been using so
far,” said Richard Stallman, who is in India this week to attend a GNU/Linux Day in Pune.”

NewsFactor Network writes “Imagine what would happen if the United Nations supported development of Linux, both in industrialized nations and in the developing world. Linux would benefit by bringing more developers to the table and by becoming the backbone of developing economies. Developing countries would benefit from an inexpensive infrastructure and the growth of a technology industry that could communicate with the industrialized world.”

LinuxSecurity Contributors writes: This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “Snort-Setup for Statistics HOWTO,” “Ad
Zapping With Squid,” “Modular Authentication for Linux,” and “Implementing a Bridging Firewall.”
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/forums_artic le-4579.html