ZDNet News: “The Japanese game giant has been giving players a chance to try out the new system and its games in a series of Cube Club events in major American cities. The San Francisco Cube Club location will play host Thursday to the five finalists in the “What would YOU do for a Nintendo GameCube?” contest, launched last month via Nintendo’s Web site.

According to Nintendo, the entrants include “Lizzy,” who will eat the GameCube made of Spam, cat food and chocolate syrup.”

SecurityFocus: “This is the second part of a four-part series devoted to an overview of LIDS, a Linux kernel patch that will allow users to take away the all-powerful nature of root in order to give programs exactly the access they need and no more. The first article in this series offered an overview of LIDS. This installment will look at file restrictions, LIDS File ACLs, and LIDS enhancements of Linux capabilities.”

ZDNet: “The latest DVD featuring cartoon sensation “The Powerpuff Girls” may boast fun games for young PC users, but three computer programs on the disc have also been infected by the “FunLove” virus.”

Reported at The Register: “WWW creator Tim Berners Lee has given his strongest hint yet that the W3C organization he created ought to shun the idea of accepting royalty-bearing patents as web standards. He also acknowledges that the move could lead to the fragmentation of the Web.

Berners Lee’s comments were made in a presentation to the W3C’s Patent Policy Working Group (PPWG) earlier this month, the minutes of which were finally published yesterday.”

“UUCP is a well known tool suite for copying data between unix-like
systems. Zen-Parse reported that the higher privileges of uux (UID
uucp) aren’t dropped if long options instead of normal (short) options
are used. An attacker could exploit this hole, by specifying a malicious
configuration file to execute and/or access arbitrary data with the
privilege of user uucp.” Advisory posted at LinuxSecurity.com.

“Tonight (Halloween) at midnight Pacific U.S. Time, /dev/null’s third Annual NetHack Tournament opens. As with past years, the Tournament is open to anyone who’d like to play. We’re also open to anyone who’d like to volunteer to run a game server, since (though we have a T1 hosting the main game server) play can be slow across the transoceanic links.” Read the full announcement at Slashdot.

Reuters (via Yahoo): “The “cookie”, a simplistic identification tag that most Internet users unknowingly carry when surfing the Web, runs the risk of being outlawed under a proposed privacy directive from the European Commission.”

IDG/Network World Fusion: “Linux advocates who have experience offering the open-source operating system to large companies say there’s a rosy future in the enterprise market.

In the current environment of increased budget pressures, corporations are much more open to the idea of free, open-source software, said Dieter Hoffmann, managing director for Central and Eastern Europe at Linux software maker Red Hat.”

The number of Australian Internet users availing themselves of song-swapping services since the free Napster went away has actually increased. Quote from a Jupiter Media Metrix analyst: “There are too many applications and too many new technologies being developed to provide what the customer wants, [for this market] to be completely regulated out of existence.” Reported at ZDNet Australia.

Mitchell Baker sent us this announcement: “Mozilla.org will host a developer day at the Netscape campus in Mountain
View on November 9, 2001. We’ve scheduled sessions aimed at both JavaScript developers (Developing
Applications using XUL and JavaScript, an XBL overview) and those
interested in Mozilla’s core capabilities (XPCOM, embedding,
networking).Brendan Eich will lead a discussion of where we’re heading
with Mozilla 1.0. We started this discussion at the O’Reilly Open Source
Conference in July, now it’s time for an update. We’ll also launch a
Business Forum, with a focus on project management, and have some cool
demos.

See http://mozilla.org/events/developer-day.html for the session
schedule and information on *how to RSVP*. Registration fees will be
very low (as in $15-25). Just enough to cover expenses.”