Reported at CNET News.com: “SAN FRANCISCO–Apple Computer will release on Saturday an operating system update
designed to improve performance and add capabilities to the original version of Mac OS X
that debuted in the spring.

“This is the release that everybody is going to end up using,” Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs
said Tuesday morning at the Seybold Seminars publishing conference here.”

From Wired News: ”
E-mail delivery has been particularly sluggish during the past two weeks. Messages have arrived at their destinations hours after being sent, sparking speculation
that new surveillance programs by government intelligence agencies might be responsible for the sudden slowdown.

But in truth, most transmission delays can be traced to the recent spate of e-mail and server worms that primarily attack Microsoft products — so much so that
one prominent technology research firm recommended Tuesday that businesses switch to server software other than Microsoft’s IIS until the company
completely rewrites the program from the ground up.”

Reported at SecurityFocus: ”

Hackers, virus-writers and web site defacers would face life imprisonment without the possibility of parole under legislation
proposed by the Bush Administration that would classify most computer crimes as acts of terrorism.

The Justice Department is urging Congress to quickly approve its Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), a twenty-five page proposal that would
expand the government’s legal powers to conduct electronic surveillance, access business records, and detain suspected terrorists.”

ActiveState , the leader in open source programming languages, now provides additional support and resources for Tcl. The Tcl Clinic is a commercial support service delivering technical expertise on Tcl and Tcl-related issues. The Tcl Cookbook is a repository of rigorously reviewed Tcl recipes contributed by the Tcl community for the community, which are freely available for download.Tcl, short for Tool Command Language, is a powerful interpreted programming language. It is crossplatform, open source, easy to use, embeddable and extensible. Tcl’s flexibility, ease of use, and power has made it popular amongst numerous blue chip companies such as: AOL, Cisco, NBC, and GE.

“Tcl has proven to be the best scripting language for our automated testing environment for over a decade now. The number of Tcl users has grown from a few engineers to over thousands within our organization,” Hemang Lavana, Software Engineer, Cisco Systems.

The Tcl Cookbook is a new collaborative website, built by ActiveState, which hosts community contributions to The Art of Tcl Programming. Members of the Tcl community are invited to contribute code, comments, and ratings for recipes. This living collection allows programmers to be more productive with Tcl, and supplies a dynamic space for the rapid content development of a cookbook.

ActiveState’s Tcl Clinic provides support for Tcl applications and internals on a wide range of platforms. Support is available on a per-incident basis, as a prepaid support contract, or through ActiveState’s TclDirect.

“ActiveState has successfully managed to fill in the spot of providing Tcl support where Scriptics/Ajuba left off. With a response time of less than an hour, no matter what time of the day or night the support is requested, I wonder — do the Tcl developers at ActiveState ever sleep? I have been very much impressed with the current distribution of ActiveTcl and look forward to your future Tcl-based products.” Hemang Lavana, Cisco.

Other ActiveState Tcl initiatives comprise ActiveTcl, our free Tcl distribution, available for Linux, Solaris, and Windows; and our hosting of the primary Tcl community website. Future plans include Visual Tcl, full Tcl support in the Komodo IDE, and a ASPN Tcl. Subscribe to the http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Tcl/Mail“>Tcl mailing list to stay informed on our Tcl developments.

For more information, please visit our web site at www.ActiveState.com or contact:
Lori Pike
Director of Corporate Communications
LoriP@ActiveState.com

U.S. retailers are pleading with Nintendo to deliver more holiday Game Cubes, but the gaming company says it probably won’t be able to do it. Stores such as Wal-Mart have asked the company to increase shipments of its new console system to offset an expected shortfall of Microsoft’s Xbox machine. Microsoft once bragged that there would be no shortage of Xbox gaming consoles available for the holiday season; now the company is uncertain of just how many of the devices will be available on its delayed November 15 launch date. From Reuters.

As MSNBC’s report on the matter states, it’s time to question authority. In the U.S., the authorities — the White House and its Congressional allies — want to make the Mobilization Against Terrorism Act (MATA) the law of the land. Some of the more heinous provisions of MATA allow the U.S. to use its top secret surveillance networks against all American citizens, giving law enforcement officials access to Carnivore e-mail snooping technology without court order, allow the Echelon data/voice listening network to be used to spy on American citizens,and grant virtually unrestricted access to otherwise private voice-mail messages. Oh, and then there’s the part where evidence collected by foreign law enforcement agencies would be used against U.S. citizens, even if that evidence was obtained in a manner that would violate that citizens’ constitutional rights.

Reported at ZDNet: “Sun Microsystems will debut its most ambitious and prestigious product to date on
Tuesday, the 106-processor Starcat server, in what some analysts say has become a
two-horse race with IBM for the lucrative Unix server market.

The Starcat server–officially called the Sun Fire 15K and shipping in volume during the next
three months–will come in four basic configurations ranging from a 16-processor model costing
$1.4 million to a 72-processor model priced at $4.1 million.”

From ZDNet: “IBM has been the most influential commercial supporter of the open-source operating system in
the past, and last week it detailed plans to port more of its Tivoli enterprise management software
to Linux. Tivoli Policy Director and security tools will by the end of the year supplement other
Tivoli storage management and software distribution products, as well as key applications and
middleware. WebSphere Commerce Suite recently began shipping on Linux for zSeries­-formerly
S/390­-mainframes.”

From vnunet: “As Linux grows, so has the demand,
with Microsoft citing it as the number one threat to its traditional
monopoly.
With this growth, Linux is fast becoming open to more breaches, if
those using it do so without the proper mind-set – that of ensuring
security is top priority. As users start to download Linux, security
needs are very much up to the individual and this is why many of
the recent security breaches have cropped up.”

Dmitry writes “The new release of mnoGoSearch Open Source search engine software 3.2.0 is available from mnoGoSearch website. Formerly known as UDMSearch, the search engine is designed for intranet and web servers. The new version includes numerous improvements and new features, including support for virtually every character set, support for synonyms fuzzy search, and many others (details here).”