Kelly McNeill writes “Tuesday, Apple unveiled its highly anticipated iPod MP3 player, a device that many believe will lead to a series of products meant to realize the company’s vision for making its brand the “digital hub” for all external devices. Now that the cat is out of the bag, I’d like to take this time to analyze the iPod’s specifications, compare it to competing products and see how it will fare against the competition.”

Reuters: “The company in charge of new “.biz” Internet
addresses cleared a legal hurdle late Wednesday when plaintiffs in a
lawsuit declined to post a bond that would have prevented the company
from handing out disputed names.

But NeuLevel, which has been embroiled in legal battles surrounding its new Internet domain
since the summer, said it would not decide whether to hand out the names until it had assessed
its options.”

Anandtech: “Linux needs to be more approachable for novices, and those who use Windows, since that is where
much of the conversion will come from. If the community can get fully behind KDE 2.x and 3.x that will
help. If the KDE or Samba groups can produce a consistent, super easy and nearly automatic dialog to
configure and activate Samba file sharing with Windows networks, that will also help.”

From advogato: “The financial situation for VA Linux looks bleak. Those of us who depend on SourceForge for development are, or
should be, getting worried. Already, one of the core services provided by SourceForge has fallen into “no longer
being maintained”. It seems prudent to develop back-up plans.

Of course, it’s possible that SourceForge will continue to function smoothly. It wouldn’t be at all unexpected for a
company with a large stake in open source to take it over. However, many of the dot-com closings have been
abrupt, taking even employees by surprise. Ghostscript, for example, simply cannot afford this disruption.” Check the discussion for SourceForge manager Patrick McGovern’s response, and remember, VA Linux owns OSDN, the parent company of NewsForge.

Reviewed at Linux.com: “Mandrake 8.1 is by far the most ambitious offering to date. Mandakesoft has gone to great
lengths to insure that first time users find themselves using their new operating system rather than
installing, configuring and learning it. However, since 8.1 is their first major release since their
IPO in August, Mandrakesoft finds itself in the spotlight as a publicly traded software company
for the first time. With the following, we’ll discover if the Mandrake crew has risen to the
challenge.”

From The Wall Street Journal (via MSNBC): “Will anthrax anxiety bring on the demise of snail mail? Cathy Walbert, a Pittsburgh homemaker, began throwing away
unsolicited mail that comes to her house. One envelope arrived the
other day with the words “You’ve been selected” printed on the
envelope. “I thought, `No thank you. Select someone else,’ and threw it
away,” she says. That sentiment could bring dire consequences for companies that
rely on mail to generate business.”

Network World Fusion: “Atempo’s Time Navigator is backup and restore
software that runs on Windows NT/2000, Unix and
Linux servers. EMC’s Fastrax is software that
moves backup/recovery data between EMC
Symmetrix systems and tape libraries, freeing up
LANs and storage-area networks for other
business-critical functions.”

Dave Dittrich, known in security circles as an expert on DDoS methods and for his Honeynet Prject, has written a response to the claims made by Steve Gibson, who has stated that the raw sockets support featured in Windows XP pose a serious security threat. From Dittrich’s response: “I think that Steve is focusing on only one issue in a very complex
set of issue (to the exclusion of a number of other equally important
issues) and is putting an overly large amount of energy into this one
issue. My read of the comments I’m hearing from others is that this
unbalanced approach comes across to them as FUD or hype.”

Wired News: “A security news website closed down Wednesday after its owner decided it wasn’t worth fighting a malicious hacker who defaced the
site the day before.

The message bore the name of Kim Schmitz, a well-known hacker. But many in the hacker community doubt he was responsible, and
Schmitz has reportedly said he didn’t do it.

The episode began Tuesday when the homepage of SecurityNewsPortal (SNP) was replaced with a message criticizing the site for being
a “scenewhore” that makes money off reporting security news.”

Posted at Help Net Security: “It is possible to create an RPM (Redhat Package Management) file
with ‘corrupted’ data that will cause arbitrary code to execute
when the file is queried. (eg: an rpm utility is used to gain
information about the contents of the file, such as version, build
date etc, when checking the file for corruptions against the stored
MD5 sum, etc. )”