Paul Emsley posts the latest summary of traffic and topics from the Debian Hurd mailing list. Discussions this week include long hostnames in Heimdal, tinkering with Mach header files, and OSKit-Mach documentation.

From The Register: “There has been a lot of fuss made about Microsoft’s new software licensing
programme recently but following weeks of claim and counterclaim, depositions to
government bodies, two delays and plenty of public posturing, if you’re anything
like us you will be completely confused as to what the hell is actually going on.

That is why we’ve decided to write a small, informative and mildly entertaining guide
to what it is, why Microsoft is doing it, why others aren’t and what’s going to happen
to it.”

Wired News reports: “In a series of votes ending at midnight Thursday, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly defeated the last-ditch efforts by Sen. Russ Feingold
(D-Wisconsin) to limit police surveillance powers.

The Senate then voted 96-1 for the unaltered USA Act, which includes the biggest eavesdropping expansion in a generation. Feingold
was the lone dissenter. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) described Feingold’s three amendments as “outdated and nonsensical.” Hatch said “current law
perversely gives the terrorist privacy rights…. We should not tie the hands of our law enforcement and help hackers and
cyber-terrorists to get away.””

LinuxJournal has released the results of its 2001 Reader’s Choice Awards. Red Hat took the top spot for favorite Linux distribution, KDE for favorite desktop environment, and C for programming language. As for favorite programming beverages, nothing beats a hot cuppa joe.

From UnixReview.com: “This
month, I’d like to talk about Quanta Plus, a Web Development Environment for KDE2. There are a few other Free Software HTML
Editors for Linux and other *Nixes in various stages of development, but Quanta Plus has nifty features that set it apart from the others.

I’ve always been partial to Vim for editing HTML, but Quanta has some features that might lure me away from the joys of vim. I’ve been
using Quanta’s Preview Release 1 for a few weeks. Oddly, the second preview release wouldn’t compile on my system. I’m looking
forward to the next release to see what features have been added or improved.”

The next Pentium 4 upgrade from Intel carries the production name of Northwood, and will be a 2.2GHz processor based on the 0.13-micron manufacturing process. It won’t be available until early 2002, likely handing the top processor slot, as far as performance is concerned, back to Advanced Micro Devices. AMD plans to release its 1.6GHz Athlon XP 1900+ chip later this year. Story at ZDNet.

– By Richard Stallman–

On Monday, NewsForge published my article warning about anti-terrorism
measures that can threaten our freedom. I finished the article last
week; two subsequent events related directly to what I wrote.

Firstly, Bush condemned Congress for “leaking secret information.”
What was the big secret? He won’t confirm, but it appears to be
neither a fact nor a plan, but a prediction: that there was a near
certainty of further terrorist attacks in case the United States began military
action.

Who was this secret being kept from? Not from the terrorists; whoever
is planning more attacks already knows this. It was being kept secret
from you and me, the American public — and our elected representatives
were castigated for telling us what our enemies already know. This
illustrates perfectly why we must oppose further government secrecy
powers.

Please note that I am not saying that the United States should hold back from
effective measures against terrorists lest they retaliate. That is a
recipe for surrender. But how to deal with terrorists is one
question; whether our public servants should keep secret from us that
which our enemies know is another.

Secondly, last week the House of Representatives stood firm against
Attorney General John Ashcroft’s proposals to abolish some basic civil
liberties. But just last night the Senate voted to accept them.
The Senate’s “Uniting and Strengthening America (USA) Act” would do
all these things and more:

• Allow for indefinite detention of non-citizens, denying them the
  chance to defend themselves in court.

• Reduce judicial supervision of federal telephone and Internet
  surveillance.

• Expand secret searches — see http://www.aclu.org/congress/l100801e.html.
• Allow officials to designate domestic groups as terrorist
  organizations and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from
  entering the United States. Membership in such an organization would become a
  deportable offense. See http://www.aclu.org/congress/l100801d.html.

• Let the FBI seize sensitive business records about
  individuals without having to show evidence of a crime.
  See http://www.aclu.org/congress/l100801a.html.

The supporters of this bill apparently feel there is no need to *ask*
Americans to unite — they plan to “unite us” whether we will or not.
This bill is being rushed through committee, and may reach the Senate
floor soon, so the ACLU is asking Americans to call or write their
senators ASAP to oppose the bill.

See http://www.aclu.org/action/usa107.html for more information.

Copyright 2001 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted
in any medium provided the copyright notice and this notice are
preserved.

David Sugar writes: “Today I am announcing the 7th major release of GNU Bayonne for developing free software based telephony application services.

Using a commodity PC platform running GNU/Linux and multi-line telephony hardware available from numerous vendors, GNU Bayonne has already been used to create and deploy commercial voice applications that interface with the public telephone network. Such applications can include basic services like Voice Mail, as well as web integrated voice commerce (v-commerce) and customer relations management systems. GNU Bayonne will offer scalability to support deployment of carrier grade enhanced services under free operating systems.

This new version provides improved support for building digital telephony services and applications under free software by adding support for CAPI based BRI cards. An important contributor in this effort has been Kai Germaschewski, who is better known for his work related to ISDN4Linux and CAPI4Linux.

GNU Bayonne also supports Voicetronix hardware, which offers low cost multi-post analog DSP telephony cards. Voicetronix was the first telephony card vendor to release their drivers and api under the GPL, supporting the GNU Bayonne project from the start.

We continue to support the Quicknet telephony cards and the Linux kernel standard “/dev/phone” interface, as well as analog and some digital telephony cards from Intel. Work on various other telephony cards and support for next generation IP based telephony networks are also in progress.

To broaden GNU Bayonne’s support for high density telephony applications for use in building carrier class applications, Open Source Development Labs (http://www.osdl.org) has agreed to host a digital telephony test and development facility. This facility is remotely accessible to all those interested in developing and demonstrating GNU Bayonne’s support for carrier class telephony applications. Those interested simply need apply as a lab “associate”. Further information can be found at their site.

GNU Bayonne and all related non-hardware specific software needed for building and running it may be found at the GNU ftp site (ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu). Individual drivers and telephony hardware related libraries are provided directly from the respective vendors. All information about GNU Bayonne may be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/bayonne.

GNU Bayonne is a standard package in the GNU project and is also part of the broader GNU and free Telephony effort that is directed under GNUCOMM (http://www.gnu.org/projects/gnucomm). GNU Bayonne is also used as a part of GNU Enterprise (http://www.gnue.org). In addition to supporting GNU/Linux, we are looking to make GNU Bayonne available under FreeBSD and GNU/HURD.

For further information, please contact David Sugar (sugar@gnu.org).

About the Free Software Foundation:

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users’ right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software—particularly the GNU operating system (used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant)— and free documentation. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software. Their web site, located at http://www.gnu.org, is an important source of information about GNU/Linux. They are headquartered in Boston, MA, USA

About GNUCOMM, the GNU Telephony Project:

GNUCOMM, a subsystem of GNU, provides free software solutions to common telecommunications problems. GNUCOMM will free users of voicemail, PBX, and call-center applications from reliance on the proprietary software that currently dominates such telephony equipment. The system aims to be scalable and configurable enough to allow end-users to develop their own telecommunications systems with little or no special knowledge of GNUCOMM’s internals. GNUCOMM will support both VoIP and PSTN interfaces, as well as interfaces to existing phone systems. GNUCOMM will scale from individual user installations to carrier-class sites. The website of GNUCOMM is located at http://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm/gnucomm.html.

About GNU Enterprise:

GNUe aims to provide a suite of tools and applications for solving the specific needs of the enterprise. GNUe will handle the needs of any size business, including applications for human resources, accounting, customer relationship management, project management, supply chain and e-commerce. GNUe is a free software project developed by volunteer software developers worldwide. The website of GNU Enterprise is
http://www.gnu.org/projects/gnue/.”

“Decidedly experimental. Use with caution.” –Alan Cox

Linux 2.4.12-ac1
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 14:17:26 +0100
From: Alan Cox 
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org


ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/

                 Intermediate diffs are available from
                         http://www.bzimage.org

*
*        Decidedly experimental. Use with caution
*

2.4.12-ac1
o        Merge the majority of 2.4.11/12
         -       Fall back to the Linus reiserfs code set
         -       Fall back towards Linus tree UDF
         -       Switch to Linus tree uhci.c
         -       Fix the parport compile bug

         This continues to avoid the new VM, O_DIRECT
         and the page cache work. That will come in time

BSDToday: “By my calculations, there were 2425 packages in the Packages Collection on October 1st 2001, up from 2372 the previous month.

The packages collection is 4 years old in October, and I would just like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has helped us over the
years.

I’d also like to welcome two new developers who have come on board – Martti Kuparinen and Stoned Elipot – to help us enhance and expand
pkgsrc.”