Wired News: “Under the new act, Canadian authorities could receive unprecedented powers, including the
right to tap communications between Canada and other countries; and the right to censor
the Internet.

In the latter area, the act will amend the criminal code “to eliminate online hate propaganda,”
and amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to cover the prohibition against hate messages
not just on telephones but on all communications technologies.”

“A less tenacious company might have
cancelled the event. But not Microsoft, the
world’s largest software company. On
October 25th, it will release the new version
of its flagship computer operating system,
Windows XP, at a splashy launch in a theatre
in New York. “We want this event to help
remind the world that New York still
represents strength and determination,” Bill
Gates, Microsoft’s founder and chief software
architect, said recently.

Yet more than anything, Microsoft wants to
remind the world that it too is back.” From Economist.com.

Wired News: “The device — called the iPod — can be synched with the computer using a high-speed cable connection that allows consumers to download
their music into a portable system, which can then be accessed by either a car or home stereo system. Apple has been developing a wireless network that the company has been integrating with all of its new products.
Conceivably, the new digital device will have access to that network.

Developed with Lucent Technologies, the AirPort system can connect an Apple’s iBook entertainment system with its Power
Mac G4 from 150 feet away. Users can then download — or swap — music files from anywhere in their house.”

PC World: “Vinton Cerf, who could claim to have invented the Internet without becoming a national punch line,
recently offered an optimistic view of the online future–as well as sharing a look back at the Net’s remarkable growth. IP version 6, which is in
development, will contain 28 bits of address space, he said. Cerf joked that “while I can’t guarantee that will be enough,” he
estimates that 28 bits falls “just short” of being enough to house an address for every star in the Milky Way.

“After that, I’ll be dead and somebody else can worry about it,”
he said.”

From Darin Adler: “A new release of the Nautilus graphical shell and file manager is
available. There have been many improvements since Nautilus 1.0.4 was
released, including a number of things that were done by hackers at Red Hat
to improve Nautilus 1.0.4 for their release that are now rolled into the
mainstream Nautilus source code.”Source code is available at the usual place in ftp ftp.gnome.org (or will be
once the next update happens).

Three of the most-noticeable items that are new in 1.0.5:

Requires Mozilla 0.9.5
Gets rid of ~/Nautilus, replacing it with “start-here:”
Uses “.desktop” files instead of “Nautilus links”

There have been many changes and bug fixes since 1.0.4. See
http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/nautilus/NEWS for details.

Nautilus 1.0.5 requires bonobo 1.0.9 or newer, eel 1.0.2 or newer, gnome-vfs
1.0.3 or newer, and librsvg 1.0.1 or newer, as well as the other packages
already required by Nautilus 1.0.4.

— Darin

“Network installation of Linux doesn’t differ greatly from a standard
installation that uses a local CD-ROM, and you will find that it meets
our twin criteria of Cheap and Easy. Cheap, because it eliminates
redundant hardware. As for Easy, well, keep reading and find out for
yourself.” More for your reading enjoyment at LinuxWorld.com.

From O’Reilly’s Linux DevCenter: “System administrators are no longer alone in
their concern for security. The increase in
high-profile virus attacks, and a general sense
of heightened security, means that executives
are likely to have security on their mind. It may
be easier than ever to enlist their support for
securing our networks and systems, and they
may be more likely to put up with some
inconvenience for users if it means tighter
security.

This article gives an overview of the basics
necessary to secure your network…”

” Last time around, I talked about a system that is kind of like 411 for your network, our new old friend, LDAP. With it, you can get access to your
corporate contact information from anywhere in this big old world. At the end of it, we had a simple LDAP server and the means to enter new information. Today, I’d
like to explore the topic further. If you missed the first part, you can find it right here.

One of the things I did not cover in that article was the subject of “schema”, and that may have left a few of you scratching your heads when it came to your
slapd.conf files.” Linux Journal.

From the Caldera security advisory: “Yet another ptrace race condition has been found which allows local
attackers to get access to the root account.

Also, a local attacker can use a recursive symlink structure setup
to effectively cause all filesystem actions to hang for an infinite
amount of time.

The IPTABLES implementation in the 2.4 kernel also had a problem in
the RELATED connection handling of the ip_conntrack_module which is
fixed by the supplied packages.”

From a Red Hat security advisory: “A vulnerability has been found in the ptrace code of the kernel (ptrace is
the part that allows program debuggers to run) that could be abused by
local users to gain root privileges.”