Reported at CNET News.com: “U.S. lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill Tuesday that could greatly expand the
electronic surveillance powers of police and ratchet up penalties relating to certain
computer crimes.

Known as the Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (PATRIOT)
Act, the bill was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by F. James Sensenbrenner
Jr., R-Wis., and John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., and is expected to be debated in committee
Wednesday afternoon.

“It’s incredibly likely to make it through,” said an aide to the House Committee on the Judiciary.” PATRIOT is the successor to ATA, the proposed Anti-Terrorism Act. Critics say that not much has changed about the proposed legislation, except for its name.

Linux-based digital TV recorder-maker TiVo is being sued by Pause Technology for allegedly violating that company’s patents. As you might have deduced from the name of the company, Pause holds a patent for technology that allows viewers to pause live television replay while it is being recorded, and fast-forward through the recording to “catch up” with the live broadcast. From CNET News.com.

From LinuxPR: “The Suncoast Linux Users Group aka S.L.U.G. needs your help. We have been
invited to do another show at the Computer and Technologies Showcase in
Tampa, Florida on October 17th and 18th. We have had great success in the past
at the shows. How ever due to many Linux based businesses having to cut back
on LUG support because of the market, we have not been to successful in getting
enough promo items and speakers for this show. With Limited supplies of promo
items it will last just for a few hours.

If anyone can help out with supplying promo Items such as Open Download distro
copies of RedHat , Mandrake , Turbo,Slackware, Debian, Progeny, etc,. stickers,
hats, misc, it would help to make a great show.

This also could be a good time for our Lugs to pull together and form a Alliance.
Perhaps we could call it the Florida Linux Alliance or F.L.A. for short?”

From ZDNet: “Sun Microsystems has acknowledged three flops in its acquisition strategy in the areas of
consumer gadgets, storage and software.

Sun reported in a regulatory filing that the acquisitions of Diba in 1997, Encore in 1997 and
NetDynamics in 1998 didn’t work out as hoped.

In all these cases, products that didn’t match initial expectations forced the Palo Alto, Calif.,
server maker to write off a total of $51 million of value, the company said in a filing with the
Securities and Exchange Commission.”

From an advisory at LinuxSecurity.com: “Groff is the GNU version of troff, a document processor that ships
with most Unix systems. Among other functions, it formats system
manual pages into human-readable form.” A new release fixes an issue that caused groff to read untrusted commands from working directories, and modifies a command that was vulnerable to a format string attack.

LinuxJournal’s John Biggs paid a visit to Compaq’s Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. in the hopes that they could bring back his iPAQ from the dead. What is the iPAQ, you ask? Biggs: ”
The iPAQ is Compaq’s latest foray into the world of handheld computing. In a welcome departure from most major OEM’s attitudes, Compaq is embracing the
open-source model in hopes of creating a truly pervasive computing platform. The 3650 model has a 240 x 320 pixel color screen and a 206 MHz Intel
StrongARM 32-bit processor that can be upgraded by using a set of cradles that hold compact Flash or PCMCIA cards.” Yes, there’s Linux inside.

Reported at The Register: “A web standards schism would be “a terrible thing”, says the man at the centre of
the firestorm over the blessing of royalty-bearing patents by the World Wide Web
Consortium. Danny Weitzner is the head of the W3C’s Patent Policy Working Group,
and we caught up with him earlier today.”

“I will be honest with you: when it comes right down to it, I hate compiling applications in Linux.

Yes, yes, I know that the ability to compile our own applications on our own operating system is one of the Greatest Things Ever.
And that I would be an idiot to decry this unique ability found in Linux and its UNIX cousins. Compiling an application is, pound for
pound, the best way of installing an application on your PC because of the wonderful stability gained from an application
customized to your environment.

But why the heck does it have to be such a pain in the ass to accomplish?” Full column at LinuxPlanet.

From linux.org.mt: “With many viruses and worms recently surfacing on the Microsoft platform, it’s easy for the Linux community to be lulled into a false sense of security,
thinking “these things don’t happen to us”. However it is precisely when you drop your guard that you are most vulnerable. Whether you use your Linux box to
browse the web and other “innocuous” things like chat on IRC and download files from gnutella, or use it as a permanently-connected internet server for your
company, Linux security is something you cannot ignore. You already are a target – you became one when you connected to the internet. But you can avoid
becoming a victim.”

The AbiWord development team has released the latest version of its namesake word processor and text editing program, now at version 0.9.4. New features include fully-editable styles on both Windows and Unix versions, upgraded import/export filters, including the debut an import filter for WordPerfect documents, a speedier spell checker, and other improved and new goodies. Check out the release notes for more information.