CNET: “Hard drives will get a speed boost Wednesday from a new standard that will help them keep up with
processors.

As previously reported, the Serial ATA Working Group will announce the final version of its ATA specification at the
Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Calif.

The new standard, Serial ATA, will allow hard drives to keep up with PCs, which speed up with every iteration of
processors from the likes of Intel and AMD. This not only will improve performance, but also enable PC makers to use
smaller cables inside PCs, reducing heat and allowing for smaller systems to be developed. Serial ATA will allow data
to be transferred at 600MB per second.”

The Register: “Corel appears to have finally rid itself of its Linux business, which it pledged to sell off back at the start
of the year.

The deal is expected to be announced today, but moles have leaked details to Reuters already. The
newswire claims the buyer is a start-up called Xandros and has signed a $2 million cheque for Corel’s
Linux division.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “Recent surveys show open source software to have dramtically increased the level of penetration in the corporate world, with senior decision makers embracing the benefits of open source software. But fears are growing among notable people within the open source community, such as Bruce Perens, that Microsoft is currently building a collection of patents to fight back against these projects, which are surely damaging their bottom line. Read more here.”

” One of the dirty little secrets of the publishing world is that the vast majority of Linux books are written using Word for Windows. This is not due to disloyalty of authors but instead the demands of publishers, who take enormous delight in their elaborately constructed template files (in my estimation the antithesis of writing) whereby anyone from president of the publishing house to the guy who delivers the bottled water can enter their comments, each in a unique color, during a process called “author review.” (Author review, carried to this extent, seems like a spectacular waste of time, but maybe there’s something to it: after all, who can doubt that “Linux System Administration for the Middle Enterprise” will remain in everyone’s minds long after “huckleberry Finn” has slipped into obscurity, in that Mark Twain did not have the benefits of multicolored author review?)” More at LinuxPlanet.

SecurityFocus: “Retired Air Force sergeant allegedly hid behind free email account, surfed intelligence community’s secret Web.”

CNET: “Governments around the world have found a new rallying cry–“Software libre!”–and Microsoft is working
overtime to quell it.

A recent global wave of legislation is compelling government agencies, and in some cases government-owned
companies, to use open-source or free software unless proprietary software is the only feasible option.”

Linux Journal: “Linux World Expo just started, and it looks like a neutron bomb went off. The back wall, I am told, used to be booths. They’re gone. So is FreeBSD, with their pretty girls dressed up like devils, handing
out little devil horns and hugging geeks for cameras all over the floor. So is Lineo, which actually is here, but not as an exhibitor. My colleague Don Marti tells me Lineo just put on a great press conference that
featured software for detecting GPL violations or something like that. LynuxWorks is boothless, too.”

ZDNET: “Linux NetworX, a company that focuses on joining collections of Linux computers into a
supercomputer, will collaborate with SGI and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop software for
storing data on these “clusters” of computers, the organizations said Tuesday.”

SeattleP-I: “The latest version of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser, which became available Monday for
free download, has attracted the most attention for its failure to support rival products.

But IE 6.0, downloaded and briefly tested yesterday by
the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, also offers a few good
features, including improved security. Overall, it’s far
from a must-have but is a painless upgrade offering
incremental improvements from Version 5.5.”

The Register: “Microsoft has eradicated buffer overflows with Windows XP, following a source code security audit,
group veep Jim Allchin claimed during a keynote at the Intel Developers Forum in San Jose.

A buffer overflow, which may cause a system or process to crash, happens when a program or
process attempts to store more data in a buffer than intended. This is very useful for hackers
because it enables them to create specially formatted malformed requests which will overflow a buffer
and leave their code at parts on the system where it might subsequently be executed.”