From Wired: “Apple has been hit with a $40 million racial discrimination lawsuit filed by a former African-American employee. He’s hired a hotshot lawyer with a track record: the largest racial discrimination case in U.S. legal history.”

From O’Reilly.net Linux: “In this week’s Security Alerts, Noel Davis reports on a vulnerability in the cookie used by netfilter, a weakness that allows an attacker to access the Web admin template in Lotus Domino, and a bug in some versions of scp and sftp.”

ZDNet reports that, in the interest of security following September’s attacks, next week’s Comdex trade show will not be allowing laptops.

Kelly McNeill writes, “Imagine an organization with hundreds (or thousands) of developers working for it. All of its developers pick their own working hours. This organization has no personnel department, no accounting department or marketing department, yet manages more than a 200 percent annual growth rate, mainly through ‘word of mouth’ advertising.”

ZDNet reports: “Toshiba had big plans earlier this year for the U.S. release of a laptop with an energy-efficient chip from Transmeta, a product that would have represented a coup for the upstart chipmaker in its rivalry with mighty Intel.”

Kelly McNeill writes “I’ve been trying to teach my mother to use a computer for more than two months now. Using both Apple’s MacOS 9.1 as well as Microsoft’s Windows 98 as learning tools has resulted in nothing but failure in both instances. She hasn’t yet been able to pick up what — to me and other experienced computer users — are considered intuitive routines.”

Dave of Redhatbox.org writes with the changelog:

final:
– David Miller: sparc/scsi scatterlist fixes
– Martin Mares: PCI ids, email address update
– David Miller: revert TCP hash optimizations that need more checking
– Ivan Kokshaysky/Richard Henderson: alpha update (atomic_dec_and_lock etc)
– Peter Anvin: cramfs/zisofs missing pieces

pre8:
– Andrea: fix races in do_wp_page, free_swap_and_cache
– me: clena up page dirty handling
– Tim Waugh: parport IRQ probing and documentation fixes
– Greg KH: USB updates
– Michael Warfield: computone driver update
– Randy Dunlap: add knowledge about some new io-apics
– Richard Henderson: alpha updates
– Trond Myklebust: make readdir xdr verify the reply packet
– Paul Mackerras: PPC update
– Jens Axboe: make cpqarray and cciss play nice with the request layer
– Massimo Dal Zotto: SMM driver for Dell Inspiron 8000
– Richard Gooch: devfs symlink deadlock fix
– Anton Altaparmakov: make NTFS compile on sparc

pre7:
– me: reinstate “delete swap cache on low swap” code
– David Miller: ksoftirqd startup race fix
– Hugh Dickins: make tmpfs free swap cache entries proactively

pre6:
– me: remember to bump the version number 😉
– Hugh Dickins: export “free_lru_page()” for modules
– Jeff Garzik: don’t change nopage arguments, just make the last a dummy one
– David Miller: sparc and net updates (netfilter, VLAN etc)
– Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanups
– Jan Kara: quota initialization race
– Tigran Aivazian: make the x86 microcode update driver happy about
hyperthreaded P4’s
– me: shrink dcache/icache more aggressively
– me: fix up oom-killer so that it actually works

pre5:
– Andrew Morton: remove stale UnlockPage
– me: swap cache page locking update

pre4:
– Mikael Pettersson: fix P4 boot with APIC enabled
– me: fix device queuing thinko, clean up VM locking

pre3:
РRen̩ Scharfe: random bugfix
– me: block device queuing low-water-marks, VM mapped tweaking.

pre2:

– Alan Cox: more merging
– Alexander Viro: block device module race fixes
– Richard Henderson: mmap for 32-bit alpha personality
– Jeff Garzik: 8139 and natsemi update

pre1:
– Michael Warfield: computone serial driver update
– Alexander Viro: cdrom module race fixes
– David Miller: Acenic driver fix
– Andrew Grover: ACPI update
– Kai Germaschewski: ISDN update
– Tim Waugh: parport update
– David Woodhouse: JFFS garbage collect sleep
http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/“

Posted at LWN.net: “This will be the last release before we freeze the ui and user visible
strings for the translators and documenters. The bug list is melting
away and the tree is looking good. This release fixes a few small bugs
and improves the usability of several components.”

It’s a little late to stop the law, but IDG News Service reports that ISPs and network administrators may have to give law
enforcement agents access to their networks without a warrant under the newly enacted Patriot Act of 2001.

EET.com reports that a clone of the ARM7 32-bit RISC processor core, previously
available free for download from the Internet, has been taken down while discussions happen between the core’s designer and a Chinese
representative of ARM Holdings. The student is a member of OpenCores, is a loosely knit global organization that aims to produce Open Source synthesizable circuit descriptions.