Network World Fusion has more information on Larry Ellison offering to give away software to the U.S. government for a national ID card.

IDG News Service reports that the Linux eServer has only been available nine months.

BBC News: “If you are in your late-20s to late-30s, you may remember the once
great home computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, the BBC
Micro, Commodore 64 and Dragon 32.

Twenty years ago, home computing experienced a revolution, as
cheap and affordable microcomputers swamped the market place.

They may be considered obsolete but these microcomputers can be
brought back to life, without having to scramble around in the loft,
through the use of emulators.”

The Register: “The Internet “could become unusable as a means of communication” if something is
not done about email viruses, security firm MessageLabs warns.

The company which scans the email of corporate clients for viruses, predicts that
one in ten emails transmitted via the Internet will contain a virus by 2008, and as
many as one in two by 2013. This compares to one in every 300 emails containing
viruses the firm blocks at present.”

Wired News: ”
Users of America Online’s popular Instant Messenger Service may actually be communicating with malicious hackers.

Hackers say it’s easy to take over AIM accounts and pose as the user whose account has been commandeered, using several hacking
programs that are in wide circulation on the Internet. Accounts that have been taken over can then be used to distribute viruses by sending infested files from a “buddy.”

Hackers who are familiar with the program said that hundreds of AIM accounts have been “stolen,” and claim that
America Online (AOL) is aware of the problem, but has not fixed the programming error that allows the attack.”

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/ — Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

                  *       Update the VM to Rik's latest bits
                  *       Merge asorted minor bugfixes
                  *       Merge initial speakup hooks

                  2.4.9-ac15
                  o       Rik's next VM handling update                   (Rik van Riel)
                  o       Update mousedrivers documentation               (me)
                  o       Update 53c700 drivers                           (James Bottomley)
                  o       USB serial pl2303 fixes                         (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
                  o       USB serial modcount fixes                       (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
                  o       USB devfs fix for skeleton driver               (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
                  o       Fix possible double read_unlock in personality  (Christoph Hellwig)
                          handling
                  o       Switch to maintainers sysrq fix                 (Crutcher Dunavant)
                  o       Further pnpbios fixes                           (Thomas Hood)
                  o       Delete the right ipip tunnel                    (Taral)
                  o       Coda fixes                                      (Jan Harkes)
                  o       Fix sscanf                                      (Paul)
                  o       Clean up the semaphore fix                      (Leonid Igolnik)
                  o       Merge minimal hooks for speakup                 (Kirk Reiser)
                          | Speakup itself needs more cleaning up yet=20

Zack Brown posts the latest edition of Kernel Traffic. A quiet week with light posting, popular topics include a discussion on the status of extermal ext3 journal under 2.2, Code and ext3, and kernel.org’s recent downtime and IP change.

Carnage4Life interviews Miguel de Icaza for Kuro5hin, discussing Bonobo, Mono, .NET, and all matters Unix.

In this edition: Compiling Jed, Xdm’s Shared Libs, Naming the System, and Supporting the Hurd’s Features. Posted by Paul Emsley at kt.zork.net.

From a LinuxWorld feature: “There are few technical reasons not to use twisted-pair and 10- or 100BaseT
Ethernet if that is what you prefer, and don’t mind spending the money. Any
up-to-date book on networks explains the advantages of this newer technology. My
advice is for 50 or fewer devices, don’t rip out an existing Thinnet installation and
upgrade to new NICs and cabling thinking this will increase performance. For 50 or
more PC X terminals, however, the equation tilts in the other direction.”