ZDNet UK: “Excite@Home Australia users are up in arms over the telco’s random
raids on their broadband accounts in search of pirate activity, with
many saying it’s an invasion of their privacy.

The ISP informed users of its Optus@Home broadband service that it
would terminate customer accounts found to be downloading pirate
software or copyright material.”

Over at Slashdot, Alan Cox explains the how and why behind the process of merging Linux kernels. Not quite as simple as they first appear, indeed.

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo starts next week in San Francisco, and there’s sure to be a flurry of Linux-related corporate announcements between now and the end of the trade show. One of the first press releases out of the gate comes from embedded Linux company REDSonic, detailing what new products it plans to demonstrate at the show. Those demos include a new gateway/firewall softwre package, services providing thin-client Linux-based access to Windows applications, and a ROM-based Linux kernel designed to replace legacy BIOS code for faster booting. Read the press release at PR Newswire.

Linux Planet’s Dennis E. Powell writes about the long-ago ups and much more recent downs of the stock market — specifically, the part of the market involving Linux companies. That includes NewsForge parent VA Linux. Powell: “Over a reasonable period of time, Linux companies, the ones that didn’t believe the market 18 months ago and don’t believe it
now, will do okay. It’s good, amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth, to remember that.”

Linux Journal has posted an overview/review of the new features and functions of Apache 2.0, the world’s most popular Web server. Says writer Ibrahim F. Haddad: “If you are an IT manager or a system administrator currently using Apache 1.3.x, I highly recommend upgrading to Apache 2.0 once the
release version is available.”

From Linux Journal: “Early this year the Parliament of the Netherlands asked the Dutch Open Source Society (VOSN) and FENIT, the Dutch IT company federation, to work
together on criteria for excluding trivial patents. Now these criteria have been presented.

The negotiation was an example of the Netherlands’ Polder Model, where all parties try and listen to each other’s points of view, and special attention is
given to those issues on which parties agree. Sometimes this can lead to remarkable results, where otherwise little or no effect was to be expected.”

Everything you need to know for building a Raid-10 setup is answered in this helpful article at BSD Today. Raid-10 is a multi-layered Raid architecture that combines disk mirroring functions and enhancing the rate that data is spread across the array.

– By Tony Smith –
–The Register –

Sharp said today that it is producing a handheld based on the next-generation of its Zaurus PDA and incorporating support for 3G wireless technology for Japanese cellular telco NTT DoCoMo, but it wouldn’t say when it will ship.

“We are developing a 3G PDA for DoCoMo but can’t say when it will come out,” said Yoichi Sakai, Sharp’s corporate director and general manager of comms systems, at a Tokyo press conference.

Well, let’s see. DoCoMo’s current 3G trial is expected to become a commercial service open to all on 1 October, according to a Reuters report.

And Sharp has been telling anyone who will listen that it’s updating its Zaurus line to run Linux and will ship the new machine in October. Now, the Linux-based machine isn’t going to ship in Japan — the local version will, instead, run Sharp’s own Zaurus OS — but it will ship in the US. A version will ship early next year in Europe alongside a model designed specifically as a wireless data unit.

Oh, and Sharp’s own Web site has a pic of the new machine complete with plug-in wireless antenna.

Throw in the Christmas spend-fest (everyone hopes) right in the middle of that set of the above dates, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of when Sharp is likely to ship its 3G PDA, we reckon. Soon, in other words.

Sharp’s press conference was convened to launch the Zaurus MI-E21, the local version of the Linux-based PDA Sharp is hoping will win it back domination of the electronic organiser/PDA market, long lost to Palm. It hopes the new machine, in all its forms, will make over one million sales worldwide during its first year.

Sitting on top of the Zaurus OS — and Linux, for that matter — is UK software developer Tao’s souped-up Java virtual machine set-up, Elate and Intent, to provide games and multimedia features – it supports MPEG-4 and MP3, for example. The hardware contains an SD/MMC card slot, a colour screen and an Intel Xscale processor.

All Content copyright 2001 The Register

Anonymous Reader writes,”HP will highlight its growing Linux commitment next week at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, by showcasing several Linux-based HP products, technologies, and initiatives. Acording to this story at LinuxDevices.com, HP will announce new security software for Linux, demonstrate HP’s internally-developed Embedded Linux platform for intelligent devices (called Chai-LX), announce the open sourcing of an embeddable web services platform (ChaiServer), and evangelize a recently launched open source developer portal (devnet).”

From ONLamp.com: “I administer a few dozen FreeBSD boxes. On some I have senior administrative
duties; on others I’m just called in as needed. A few I can best describe as ‘being
stuck with.’ Every so often, I go on an upgrade spree and rebuild most of them.

CVSup is very convenient.
It also uses a huge amount
of CPU time and
generates disk activity.
While you probably don’t
care about your disk
activity or CPU usage, the
mirror maintainers care
about theirs.”