Slashdot: “MaxVlast was the first to report: “The New York Times is reporting that HP is buying Compaq to form the second-largest
computer company (after IBM). Wow.”

From the Dallas Morning News: “It was while listening to a longish church sermon one Sunday in 1876 that librarian Melvil Dewey had his moment of genius. “I jumpt in my seat and came near shouting ‘Eureka!’ ” he wrote later, marveling at the “absolute simplicity” of his idea. But for many of today’s teenagers, the Dewey Decimal System sits squarely in the ash bin of history, right next to the Victrola and the Model T. Libraries, once the great storehouses of academic knowledge, are coming in second to search engines.”

CNet and others are reporting that Hewlett-Packard will buy competing computer-maker Compaq for $25 billion. Here’s the New York Times story that first reported the merger, and here’s a a Slashdot discussion on the implications.

DaemonNews has an article discussing a network setup for people who like to put some extra effort into connecting
their machines to the Internet. The goal is to build a secure client and server farm on a single IP address.

From gnome.org: “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.”

Advogato.org: “Should governments require companies discontinuing products, release the source code?

The request for the opening of the BeOS source, made me think further about the nature of computer products.

IBM appears to be discontinuing the SanFrancisco project, which is a massive Java product, for developing custom financial systems.

Palm appears to be about to discontinue BeOS.

HP is discontinuing OpenMail support (and this one’s been discussed to death).

I think there should be a legal requirement to give up the code to discontinued products.”

The Register: “A worm called x.c, which takes advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the telnet daemon
program commonly used on Unix boxes, has being discovered, and security experts fear it is a
harbinger of worse to come.”

LinuxSecurity: “The telnet server which is shipped with SuSE distributions contains a
remotely exploitable buffer-overflow within its telnet option
negotiation code.
This bug is wide-spread on UN*X systems and affects almost
all implementations of telnet daemons available.”

DaemonNews: “A caveat of loadable modules is the security risk they present. They open a wide range of possibilities to a malicious superuser, and can be very hard to detect. As such, modules cannot be loaded or unloaded
at a securelevel greater than 0. If you are a system administrator and wish to have a module loaded, you can add an entry to /etc/rc.securelevel to load the module before the securelevel rises. If you are working
on the development of a module, you will probably want to run at securelevel -1, again, this can be set by editing /etc/rc.securelevel.”

“Sam ‘Criswell’ Hart tells us about a new venture by the people who created Tux Typing: Tux4Kids. “Tux4Kids is a non-profit organization dedicated to producing and promoting quality educational software released under Free-Software or other OSI Certified licenses.” Their current projects include Tux Typing (of course), Tux of Math Command, and TuxReader.” Read the rest of the report at seul.org.