GNOME Gnotices: “Gdkxft transparently adds anti-aliased font support to gtk+-1.2. Once you have
installed it, you can run any (well, nearly any) existing gtk+ binary and see
anti-aliased fonts in the gtk widgets. You don’t need to recompile gtk+ or your
applications. The current version of gdkxft is 1.2. Improvements include: installation
tuning, debian packaging, more gdk font API hooks, bugfixes and more. Gdkxft now features a Gnome
control center capplet.”

IBM developerWorks has announced the winners of its KDE theme contest, with first place going to Matthias Fenner of Germany. developerWorks will donate $3,000 to the non-proft Open Source organization of his choosing, along with $2,000 and $1,000 to the organizations chosen by the second and third place winners. Nice themes, and congratulations to all.

From Linux Weekly News: “The Linux Beer Hike or Linuxbierwanderung took place at Bouillon in Belgium this year. This might not seem like an obvious place to
go to but the local facilities and scenery make for the kind of location that most people pay lots of money to go to on a package
holiday. Coupled with six days of sun and only two days of rain it made this years event one of the best so far. A large crowd of
people assembled over at the Archeoscope at Bouillon. Much beer was consumed and most were doing their level best to keep up
with everyone else. The tenth anniversary of Linux was celebrated in some style. If only Linus Torvalds could have been there with
us.”

“As the U.S. government limps along in the
aftermath of last week’s terrorist attacks, one of
the heartiest broadband battles has been put
into limbo, leaving these questions unanswered:
Will beleaguered DSL provider Rhythms
NetConnections be allowed to cease its
operations as its management and creditors
want, or will the Federal Communications
Commission continue to force the company to
carry on, supporting its customers?” Reported at Network World Fusion.

Java, meet Brew. Now pack your bags and get out of wireless-land. If Qualcomm isn’t hoping to eliminate Java from the wireless communication space, it at least wishes that its competing Brew technology will be taken seriously. With quite a few third-party developers showing off applications created with Brew, Qualcomm may have been granted its wish. Brew, by the way, is short for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless. Read last Friday’s report, filed at IDG News.

The Wall Street Journal (on ZDNet) asks the inevitable: “Will the terrorist attacks have a chilling effect on what is available on the
Internet, out of fear that terrorists could use the medium to launch future attacks?”

Is that a secretary sitting on a park bench enjoying lunch or is it an intruder trying to do unspeakable things to your 802.11-based wireless LAN? According to Network World Fusion, the problem isn’t quite as silly as I’ve made it sound in the first sentence of this blurb. The reporter went on a tour of Cambridge, Mass. with a security consultant, and with the help of an IBM ThinkPad equipped with a standard wireless NIC the pair were able to see quie a bit of interesting (and even more not-very-interesting) network traffic, including router configuration data. One suggestion for network sanity: Keep the 802.11 seperate from your wired LAN.

Strange days at Berlin’s Chaos Computer Club, where the 20 year old group gathered to urge their counterparts around the world not to attack the networks and Web sites of Islamic groups. CCC leader (and ICANN board member) Andy Mueller-Maguhn issued a call for diplomacy, saying that it was important for the world to hear varying perspectives on recent events. Said club founder Steffen Wernery: “People are very angry, so I understand it. But we hackers find that it’s always a better way to let information free. The philosophy is don’t hack networks or the free flow of information.” Read the full story at Wired News.

An Associated Press report (at Salon.com) of the first day of normal trading after last Tuesday’s attacks observes that jittery investors have sent the market into a sharp decline. Not entirely unexpected, the Fed hoped to shore up the economy and market confidence by slashing interest rates by a half-point for an eighth time this year. As of 12:15PM EDT, the Dow is down 471.56, and the Nasdaq has dropped by 79.22.

bugzilla.mozilla.org recently hit bug 100,000. Check out a cached copy of the event. From comments and discussion of the 100K mark on Slashdot, a contributor notes: “…the number of filed or closed bugs cannot be used as criteria of the quality of Mozilla.”