Kelly McNeill writes “Recent industry reports suggest that MIT’s Advanced Operating Systems Group — a branch of the Lab for Computer Science — has begun planning for a public release of their a new operating system known as “Cesium.” On investigation, however, it appears that the project is a hoax.”

CNet reports that Sun Microsystems has begun the process of laying off some 3,900 of its employees.

Kelly McNeill writes “Many hackers and crackers evolve from breaking into computer systems to protecting them, working in the security industry and going legitimate to make a living at their science. But what about those who choose to join the Dark Side?”

CNet reports that Sharp plans to stick with Intel processors in the United States although it uses Transmeta processors in mini-notebooks in Japan.

LinuxJournal.com has a column attacking the people attacking Linux and Open Source. “It is ironic that, by acting as a common enemy to rally against, Microsoft has probably inadvertently done more for advancing the benefits of
the Open Source movement than any other company.

There are a number of diverse motivations for getting involved in open source, but the motivations do not affect the outcome. As is usual in a
market economy, market forces select the most effective option for getting a job done. When you look at it this way, open source is a set of
simple but highly evolved best practices for software development.”

CNet reports: “Online retailer Amazon.com shaved millions of dollars from its technology costs
last quarter by switching to the Linux operating system, a disclosure that could provide
some guidance for other companies seeking to cut expenses in a stagnant economy.”

Grok writes, “Today Netscape released the next version of their browser suite software, version 6.2. Your faithful MozillaNews staff lept into action and quickly downloaded and installed Mozilla’s brother.” The
story’s at Mozillanews.org.

Posted at LWN.net: “The squid proxy server can be crashed with a malformed request, resulting
in a denial of service attack. After the crash, the squid proxy must be
restarted. The weakness can only be triggered from an address that
is allowed to send requests, as configured in the squid configuration
file.

An upgrade to a fixed version of the squid package is the only reasonable
countermeasure against the bug.”

LinuxUser.co.uk checks in with Telia Net 10 months after the ISP replaced a Unix server farm with main-frame Linux. “Customers are already benefiting from the resultant reductions in the cost of providing ISP services, according
to Telia Net, and these reductions seem set to continue if the company succeeds in its intention of more than
quadrupling its mainframe’s current population of 1500 virtual servers within the next year. Indeed, Wulff Riedl
has plans for Telia Net to take Linux and open source tools on board wherever possible.”

LinuxJournal.com has an interview with Jon “maddog” Hall while they were all stuck on a boat together. maddog describes his role protecting the Linux trademark as executive director of Linux International: “Sometimes it’s unpleasant because some people try to use the Linux name for things that really aren’t very kosher. Like the time a
guy tried to start a porn site with the name Linuxchicks.com, and Deb Richardson, who started www.linuxchix.org, was understandably upset
about this and requested that we go in and stop it. But Linus wants the word Linux to be used in any legitimate form, so now we’ve set up a
thing called the Linux Mark Institute; it’s a nonprofit. It charges a minimal amount of money if you want to use the word Linux in a registered
trademark. If you want to use it on a t-shirt or a coffee mug, a promotional item, then that’s free.”