Reported at CNET News.com: “The W3C recommended SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), advancing it from “candidate
recommendation” status where it has spent the last 13 months having its tires kicked by the Web
graphics world… Because it’s written in XML,
SVG is better able to make
graphics searchable and
digestible by screen readers, a
boon for Web authors
struggling to comply with
increasingly strict accessibility
requirements for people with
disabilities.”

From BSD Today: “Evans Data Corporation, a market research company focused on the software development
community, announced in their mbedded Systems Developer Survey that BSD Unix will grow to be
the #5 most popular embedded operating system in 2002 — up from this year, when BSD did not
even appear on the chart.”

Anonymous Reader writes “OSNews is hosting an interview with Ville Turjanmaa, the creator of the Menuet Operating System. Menuet is a new, 32-bit OS under the GPL and it fits to a single floppy (along with 10 or so more applications that come as standard with the OS). It features protection for the memory and code, it has a GUI running at 16,7 million colors (except with 3Dfx Voodoo cards), sound at 44.1 khz stereo etc. And the most important and notable feature? The whole OS was written in 100%, pure 32-bit x86 assembly code!”

Reported at The Industry Standard: “The European Parliament
Wednesday adopted a report that says the global
electronic surveillance network known as
Echelon does exist.

Some 367 members of the European Parliament
voted to support the report – several years in the
making – while 159 voted against, and 34
members abstained at the Parliament’s plenary
session in Strasbourg, France.:

“Ever since Elvis plopped down his nickel and crooned a song captured in glistening black vinyl, children everywhere have dreamed of making the next
hit single. Unfortunately, doing so usually costs more than the paltry sum The King laid out for his tracks. Today, anyone with a PC can be the next
George Martin or Trent Reznor, making the next big hit to be traded illegally, right in their own bedroom! Linux’s capabilities make it perfect for multimedia
production, and as distributions become easier to install and set up, more ordinary users will want to do more multimedia projects.” Read this story at Linux Journal.

From Slashdot: “For your linux loving friends with everything, why not get a
TuxScreen? This phone is based on the Compaq Linux distribution, normally used on
the iPaq. When is the last time you needed to upgrade the packages or distribution
on your phone?”

Posted at PR Newswire: “Viosoft(R) today announced the
availability of Arriba!(TM) Embedded Linux Edition for the Intel(R) IXP1200
Network Processor family.
The Arriba! Embedded Linux Kernel Edition is a cross-platform development
environment for the embedded Linux kernel, device drivers and user-level
applications. The Arriba! Embedded Linux Kernel Edition provides a complete
Windows-hosted compiler tool chain for the IXP1200 Network Processor.”

From LinuxSecurity.com: “screen is a terminal multiplexer program that allows reattaching to
a detached session as well as multi-attached (shared) sessions.

The screen package allows a local attacker to obtain root privileges if
the /usr/bin/screen command is installed setuid root and if a directory
below /tmp/screens/ exists.”

Posted at PR Newswire: “Qualys, Inc., a leading
provider of enterprise network vulnerability assessment and monitoring
solutions, today announced that its QualysGuard(TM) online vulnerability
scanning service is the first scanning solution capable of detecting the
presence of a potentially dangerous new Linux backdoor Trojan identified as
the Remote Shell Trojan. This Trojan consists of two primary components — a
virus-like self replication capability, and the ability to install a backdoor
process to enable remote attacks on the infected system. Qualys is making
available a free downloadable tool to probe for the trojan’s presence on a
Linux machine along with a free downloadable fix to cleanse infected files.”

Commentary from CNET News.com: “StarOffice, and to some extent ThinkFree, have suffered from the
belief that they needed to target Office’s current depth and breadth.
The best approach is to realize that there will always be people in an organization who need the
full range of functionality in Office. But a much larger number will only need a good e-mail
package that generates reliably formatted Word documents.”