Wired: “A senator changes his mind after calling for a prohibition on data-scrambling products without backdoors for government surveillance. Now, he “has no intentions” of working on such an encryption bill.”

DebianPlanet: “I downloaded the 1.44 reiser boot images. I am about to reinstall Woody as a router and I want to try
ReiserFS. I dd’d the *.bin’s onto floppies. The rescue floppy copied just fine.

The root and driver-1 did not copy. I have tried different floppies in case the original floppies were
bad, but to no avail? Has anyone successfully used these? The boot process gets hung after the
rescue disk and I cannot mount and examine either the root or driver-1 floppy. Any ideas?”

LinuxPR: “Kivio is our flowcharting and diagraming tool for Linux. We’ve now added support for Windows as
well as releasing the Kivio Stencil Builder for Linux.

Major news on the Kivio front. We have now released “Kivio mp” for Multi Platform. This application
is our flowcharting and diagramming tool, but it now runs on Linux and Windows (soon Mac OS X)
all for the same low price of $99.95. As part of your purchase you get all of the currently available
stencils, currently over 30.”

Slashdot: “More follies from the US Patent & Trademark Office … now IBM has been awarded US Patent
#6,304,886 for software that automatically “generates [a] customized Web site without the Web site creator writing any
HTML or other programming code”, based on “a plurality of pre-stored templates, comprising HTML formatting code, text,
fields, and formulas” that are then customized through the process of asking the user a few questions. In other words, they’ve patented the
ubiquitous wizards found in FrontPage and other newbie-oriented HTML editors. This was submitted to the USPTO on June 19, 1998 — surely
someone out there knows of prior art for this?”

ZDNET “A bug in the code of the SirCam worm has prevented the malicious program from reactivating its payload,
which would have deleted files on infected PCs Tuesday, according to antivirus company Sophos.”

theHighlander writes: “The statistics on Sircam and the Nimda viruses don’t seem to lie. During the period since the Sept. 11 till today, Sircam has infected over 332,000 systems and Nimda has infected over 2 million computers, and the infections don’t seem to stop. A new strain of the Nimda, the Nimda.C virus is also expected to make a mark, since this targets the patched servers. Read more.”

David Bornat writes: “I just read an article about setting up a wireless network for your home. They use a Linksys wireless router and Linksys adapters for the network. Looks like it is pretty easy to setup and install. Also looks like it is more suited for a home network rather than a major office network. I have heard rumores that people have cracked the wirless encryption, so I wonder how secure this really is. Any body else use a wireless network? Here is the link.” (at DesignTechnica.)

Mikael Pawlo writes: “As reported by Gnuheter, Richard M Stallman does not want to be associated with the open source movement. We all know that and know the editor of the Dr Dobbs Journal knows it too. Apparently, Dr Dobbs ran an article where Richard M Stallman was associated with open source. In an open letter, Stallman explains why this is utterly wrong:
If the House Un-American Activities Committee asked me, “Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of the open source movement,” I could proudly and cheerfully say no. I’ve been campaigning since 1984 for *free software*–free as in freedom.Read the letter.”

theHighlander writes: “Questions have always been raised about the level of security offered by Wi-Fi. Discussions have always been centered on the Encryption standard used by Wi-Fi and the method in which it has been implemented. Take a look at the real world use of Wi-Fi technology, the risks involved and the methods to minimize it.”

CERT has published its stats for number of incidents reported, hotline calls received, etc.