“The Federal Trade Commission is investigating
suggestions that Sun, Rambus and Unocal
illegally kept patents secret to gain a jump on
competitors, USA Today reported on Monday.

The paper quotes “people familiar with the
probes” who say antitrust enforcers are
concerned that the three companies hid patents
in order to be ahead of the competition when
industrywide interchangeability standards are
set.” Read the report at Network World Fusion.

Reported at ZDNet News: “VMware, a maker of software that lets Intel computers run several operating systems
simultaneously, will announce a major new customer Monday: Microsoft.

VMware CEO Diane Greene said Microsoft has started distributing her company’s software to
some of its salespeople, who can use it to simplify software demonstrations that normally require
the use of several computers. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. VMware sells versions of its
software for workstations and
servers and lets a Linux or
Windows system run several
versions of either operating
system or of several other
OSes.”

Security service provider and Red Hat, Inc. have teamed up to co-author and present a white paper discussing Open Source security issues. Titled Open Source Security: A Look at the Security Benefits of Source Code Access,” the paper can be downloaded for free from TruSecure’s site. Note that the paper is presented in PDF format (about 800K in size), and registration is required. You can also read the press release at BusinessWire.

The third alpha release of Python 2.2 is now available. Download it from python.org, report bugs to the bug tracker at sourceforge.net, and read the announcement posted at Linux Weekly News.

All the news that’s fit to link in the latest edition of Python-URL, including how to write python classes in C, questions on handling deep inheritance issues, and python for system administration tasks. Posted at Linux Weekly News.

Reported at Network World Fusion: “PGP Security will unveil this week
at NetWorld+Interop 2001 in Atlanta an
easier-to-use version of its CyberCop network
vulnerability-assessment tool that will help
customers more quickly find and fix security
weaknesses in PCs, servers, switches and
firewalls.

Called Distributed CyberCop Scanner 2.0, the
tool consists of PC-based software agents and
the ePolicy Orchestrator console. The console
downloads the agents to devices attached to
corporate LANs and, in turn, those agents
report back to the console about the security
status of Windows NT or Unix-based servers
and desktops on the LAN.”

Posted at PR Newswire: “Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that it will grant
hardware, including servers and a secure storage system, to the Open
Bioinformatics Foundation, which distributes, develops and supports
standards-based open source tools for life science research and data
integration. The foundation will use the hardware to update its
infrastructure, enabling more reliable and secure distribution of its tools
and collaborative services over the Web.”

Joystick101.org posts Nolan Bushnell’s answers to questions from readers. Bushnell invented Pong, founded home and arcade gaming pioneer Atari, and started the Chuck E. Cheese pizza restaurant chain. On the decline of arcade gaming: “I don’t accept the premise that consumer games have hurt the arcades. The arcades have hurt
themselves. The games in the arcades have not kept pace in a lot of the things, and they have gotten too complex for a lot of
casual players and casual interaction.”

Reported at CNET News.com: “Intel in November plans to ship new wireless networking products that are five times faster than
current technology that lets people wirelessly link their desktop computers and laptops.

The technology, based on the new 802.11a wireless standard, is a faster successor to the
popular 802.11b standard that has become popular in offices, homes, cafes, hotels and airports
that have built untethered high-speed Net connections.”

Posted at LinuxSecurity.com: “This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “OpenSSH key management, Part 2,” “An
Introduction to OpenSSL, Part Two: Cryptographic Functions Continued,” and “Remote Monitoring.”
Also this week, if you have not read about Echelon, there are two good articles in the general section
of this newsletter.”