Posted to Slasdot is an editorial written by Roblimo describing ways to ensure that your rights and civil liberties are not removed by panic reactions of senators and other government figures. Already, the US government has given the FBI the ability to wiretap without a warrant.
“So here’s a guide, a HOWTO, if you will, that will teach you how to lobby effectively for your Constitutional rights. Let’s start with one simple and rather sad truth: You are going to be less free next week than you were last week.”

Linus Torvalds: “I’d love for VM people to look at the page reference bit cleanups
– I might have missed some place that needs to mark something referenced,
but I also know I fixed a few places that hadn’t done it right before.”

Linux-2.4.10-pre10
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 15:00:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds 
To: Kernel Mailing List 


Changelog appended..

Most of the patches are due to the continuing merge with Alan, others tend
to be fairly small.

However, I'd love for VM people to look at the page reference bit cleanups
- I might have missed some place that needs to mark something referenced,
but I also know I fixed a few places that hadn't done it right before.

For example, the old code did not react very well to read-ahead: it would
mark a page referenced on the first real access, if that page had earlier
been read in through read-ahead. In contrast, if it was _not_ read in with
read-ahead (ie the first page of a file, for example), it would not mark
the page referenced until the _second_ real access. Which just gives you
an idea of how truly random the aging used to be.

The new (simpler) code should be a lot less random. But it will probably
need a few tweaks. It would be very interesting to hear about specific
loads that show problems (or loads that are good, of course).

                 Linus

-----
pre10:
 - Alan Cox: continued merging
 - Mingming Cao: make msgrcv/shmat check the queue/segment ID's properly
 - Greg KH: USB serial init failure fix, Xircom serial converter driver
 - Neil Brown: nsfd/raid/md/lockd cleanups
 - Ingo Molnar: multipath RAID personality, raid xor update
 - Hugh Dickins/Marcelo Tosatti: swapin read-ahead race fix
 - Vojtech Pavlik: fix up some of the infrastructure for x86-64
 - Robert Love: AMD 761 AGP GART support
 - Jens Axboe: fix SCSI-generic queue handling race
 - me: be sane about page reference bits

Anonymous Reader writes “From an article on Mojolin: They haven’t failed yet, but I predict they will. Why? Well, if all of their research and analysis comes down to ‘…not enough applications’, then they obviously didn’t do their homework and they don’t understand the issues surrounding the full scale adoption of linux on the desktop. This is not uncommon; the linux commercial market is difficult to understand and, with the exception of only a few companies such as RedHat, no-one has been successful at building a company around a commercial distribution.”

From Slashdot: “I found this on C|Net, it’s an HP Printer that also supports Bluetooth.”

From TheDot: “IBM developerWorks has announced the winners of the KDE theme contest. The top prize (along with a $3,000 donation) goes to Matthias Fenner of Germany for the Winning theme…”

LinuxSecurity has the Crypto-Gram for the 15th of September. In it are some very good points which have yet to be echoed by conventional news media (in addition to Bruce’s normal security talk): “In 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed in the Atlantic. Originally people thought it was a missile attack. The FBI demanded, and Congress passed, a law giving law enforcement greater abilities to expel aliens from the country. Eventually we learned the crash was caused by a mechanical malfunction, but the law still stands.”

Network Computing takes a look at how proprietary software is commonly licensed: “software licenses have always been a great source of amusement for me. I get a chuckle when the people who make software on which other people rely produce a license that “Disclaims and excludes any and all implied warranties including … fitness for a particular purpose.” Riiiiight.”

From Slashdot: “Michael A. Bego, the CEO of Xandros Corporation has given an interview with Consulting Times. Xandros recently signed a license agreement with Corel that gave them access to Corel Linux.”

On LinuxJournal, there is an editorial piece questioning the purpose of the RIAA and record companies as middle-men in distributing music: “Salon.com recently reported (quoting Webnoize) that peer-to-peer trading of copyrighted music hit an all-time high last month (August 2001) due to the popularity of Napster clones. Meanwhile, in Seoul, World Music Entertainment and Most Best Music won a lawsuit to the tune of about $75,000 against Soribada (a Korean P2P service) for violating copyrights. FastTrack, AudioGalaxy, iMesh and Gnutella are the top four facilitators of file trading.”

From TheDot: “KOffice falls short of Microsoft Office standard: Updated Linux alternative to Office not ready for corporate big leagues”, the lengthy review takes a close and, perhaps surprisingly, fair look at the strengths and weaknesses of KOffice.” It also mentions another review thet was posted on TheDot itself.