CNN reports that the space shuttle Discovery launched Friday without incident on its way to the International Space Station with a fresh crew and fresh supplies.

SuSE has announced that it will be selling a SuSE Linux Deverloper’s Edition for IBM’s iSeries.

PC World reports that a judge has overturned an earlier ruling against Rambus which had found the company guilty of fraud after the company failed to sue Infeon for what Rambus claimed was a violation of its DDR RAM patent.

Linus has released version 2.4.8 of the Linux kernel, available at kernel.org or from your favorite/closest mirror site. Changelog below:

final:
 - Rik van Riel: free up swap cache on swapin when swap is full..
 - Robert Love: merge emu10k sound driver.  This one is better ("Yeah,
   you actually get sound out of it")
 - Jeremy Linton: swapin/swapoff race condition fix

pre8:
 - Jeff Hartmann: serverworks AGP gart unload memory leak fix
 - Marcelo Tosatti: make zone_inactive_shortage() return how big the shortage is.
 - Hugh Dickins: tidy up age_page_down()
 - Al Viro: super block handling cleanups

pre7-pre6:
 - me: better dirty balancing
 - me: sane and nice VM balancing
 - David Miller: sparc and network updates
 - Jeff Hartmann: upgrade DRM to XF86 4.1.x, drop support for 4.0.x

pre5:
 - Alan Cox: more merging
 - L.C. Chang: new SiS IDE PCI id's.
 - Maciej Rozycki: make MP table parsing more anal. Should fix broken P4 MP tables.
 - Leonard Zubkoff: merge DAC960 completion changes
 - Christoph Rohland: saner tmpfs mount-time limit behaviour (and remount)
 - me: buffer.c logic update - faster and hopefully livelock-free

pre4:
 - David Mosberger: IA64 update
 - Geert Uytterhoeven: cleanup, new atyfb
 - Marcelo Tosatti: zone aging fixes
 - me, others: limit IO requests sanely

pre3:
 - Ben Collins: 1394 updates
 - Matthew Dharm: USB storage update
 - Ion Badulescu: starfire driver update
 - VM aging cleanups

pre2:
 - Kai Germaschewski: ISDN updates
 - David Miller: sparc and network updates
 - Andrea Arcangeli, Maksim Krasnyanskiy: tasklet fixes
 - Stelian Pop: Motion Eye camera driver update
 - Jens Axboe: DAC960 update

pre1:
 - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS error checking
 - Johannes Erdfelt: USB updates
 - OGAWA Hirofumi: FAT update
 - Alan Cox: driver + s390 update merge
 - Richard Henderson: fix alpha sigsuspend error return value
 - Marcelo Tosatti: per-zone VM shortage
 - Daniel Phillips: generic use-once optimization instead of drop-behind
 - Bjorn Wesen: Cris architecture update
 - Anton Altaparmakov: support for Windows Dynamic Disks
 - James Washer: LDT loading SMP bug fix

CNN reports that a team of researchers has studied a vulnerability in the 802.11 wireless networking protocol, and issued a statement partially reading “we believe that 802.11 networks should be viewed as insecure”.

Computer World reports that the National Science Foundation has “announced a $53 million project to connect a series of remotely located powerful computers into a high-speed Linux supercomputer grid that could open vast new opportunities for scientific and medical breaththroughts.”

The picture looks like a third-generation video copy, the thing is nowhere near as small as its ads claim, and that wireless promise is all but nil if, heaven forbid, the camera signal has to cross a wall. The Industry Standard’s Mark Frauenfelder reviews X10’s cameras, providing a rather satisfying vent for anyone tired of those damn pop-under ads.

CRN: “In the spirit of the Patients’ Bill of Rights, Cable Customers’ Bill of
Rights (I actually saw this recently) and all the other bills of rights
that seem to be popping up everywhere, it seemed time for a Tech
Industry Bill of Rights.

The items on the following list, presented
in no particular order, are unfortunately
unenforceable, but this serves as a wish
list of rights many in the tech industry
deserve.”

EE Times: “With the backing of a number of powerhouse companies,
the MPEG-7 standard is expected to win ratification within weeks, paving the
way for a broad range of advances in multimedia interfaces and search capabilities.

New products that could be powered by MPEG-7 include multimedia search
engines for the Internet; program search and retrieval systems for personal video
recorders (PVRs), set-tops or MP3 players; or mobile devices that could
intelligently retrieve, manage and display only the most important and relevant
information to users under bandwidth-constrained circumstances.”

Code Red III? No such beast exists, say U.S. virus watchers. South Korea’s Information and Communication Ministry have reporterd a third variant of the Code Red worm, but security experts in the U.S. disagree that this newer, supposedly faster iteration constitutes a new variant. Story by Reuters.