Interactive Week: “System vulnerabilities – holes through which intruders may crawl inside
your servers – are cropping up at a rate of six or seven per day, a pace
that strains the resources of most system administrators, security
experts say.”

“Richard DeGrandpre wrote “Digitopia” as a warning about the false
promises of the wired world. Then it was published as an electronic
book, and all his predictions came true.

“Digitopia,” issued by Random House in March, was never reviewed or promoted or, it seems,
downloaded. “My book is just dead,” said DeGrandpre, a psychologist.

So are just about everyone else’s e-books. The publishing world’s attempts to turn electronic fiction
and non-fiction into a lucrative revenue stream have yielded only a trickle of customers.” Read more at the Chicago Tribune

Frank Cohen writes “Load tests Web applications and SOAP-based Web Services for performance and scalability. Load 2.0 Beta 1 is now available for free download at www.pushtotest.com. Load features an XML-based scripting language and test objects. Load script enables you to write intelligent test suites. The test objects handle common test functions, such as logging-in, reading through Web pages and calling Web Services. Load runs any number of test suites concurrently to check for performance and scalability. Load is distributed under an Apache-style license. For Load and a support community try www.pushtotest.com.

– By Grant Gross –

After a long period of silence, it’s time again to check on LinuxOne, that Linux company that many in Open Source community like to accuse of trying to cash in on the Linux IPO craze of 1999. The company seems to have disappeared even farther into the woodwork than previously noted.

LinuxOne (not to be confused with a Korean company that at last report was calling itself NuxOne to avoid confusion) launched in March 1999, filed for an IPO, then promptly disappeared. At last report, LinuxOne was merging with a Baltimore, Md., white box manufacturer, Micromatix.net, but that deal is apparently long dead. A search at Google and Hotbot turns up no merger news since the an October 2000 press release announcing the intended merger.

So it’s a slow August news day, and I figure I’ll poke around a little more to see if anything’s turned up since our last report. Since the first NewsForge story, I’ve exchanged email with Rick Collette, LinuxOne’s v.p. of software engineering for short time, and asked him if he’s heard anything new.

Collette, founder of the DeepLinux project and now an engineer with the Redmond Linux, has a lot of second-hand information about LinuxOne, but also observed a lot in his four months with the company in early 2000.

Collette says LinuxOne lured him to Silicon Valley with promises it intended to market a product. “Two weeks after I arrived, the CTO quits,” he says. “I’m
moved up from senior software engineer to v.p. of software engineering (I
have no idea WHY… I was happy as a code monkey).

“They turned down every product I came up with, from a games installer for Linux … to embedded OSes, to console designs. I thought my ideas and designs must have been really bad, turns out, they aren’t trying to sell ANYTHING. The sales staff was getting all frustrated, the marketing people loved what I kept bringing them, but
when the CEO presented them to the founder, he would say no. The rest
of the engineering staff had been working on getting Linux working on a
Fujitsu Siemens settop box. Nine months they worked with no results.”

Others in the company, which had about 30 employees when Collette first started, were working on a top-secret remote USB project that he says most geek kids could create with information on the Internet. LinuxOne had another company create a plastic box, and LinuxOne was pitching its remote USB product to customers using the empty case, Collette says.

The company, he says, was spending $30,000 a month. “We didn’t have $30,000 worth of anything,” he says. “We borrowed most of the equipment to do development on.”

Collette says when he questioned why the company wasn’t trying to create a product, he was fired.

Collette doesn’t include his LinuxOne experience on his resume, but he’s still sad that LinuxOne actually had a working product, LinuxOne Lite, a small version of Linux designed to run beside Windows without partitioning. “That was a really good product,” he says. “It worked on systems nobody else could get [similar products] to work on. It could’ve given us a springboard.”

No one from LinuxOne was available to comment on Collette’s version of events or the proposed merger with Micromatix.net. Emails to LinuxOne’s info addresses weren’t returned, and no one answers the phone at LinuxOne’s California phone number.

Micromatix.net CEO Timothy Jewell doesn’t return a phone message, and Michael J. Morrison, a Nevada lawyer that was representing LinuxOne in the merger, hasn’t returned an email or a phone message.

Collette says he sees LinuxOne founder Wun Chiou’s wife around Mountain View, Calif., checking on the several properties the couple manages there. But Collette says he hasn’t seen Chiou himself for several months.

“The Embedded Linux Journal has announced that the first
round of their ‘NIC contest’ is over, and NIC systems are
being sent to the twenty lucky finalists. This second annual
design contest is based on projects using the New Internet
Computer (NIC) as a platform. Projects range from the
serious, to the silly, to the sublime.” The news is from LinuxDevices.com.

From TheStandard.com: “Judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals in San Francisco are protesting
the use of software within the federal
court system that monitors Internet use
on employee computers — including
those of its judges.”

Wired.com reports that Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, accused of violating the U.S. DMCA by bypassing security in Adobe Systems’ eBooks, wouldn’t be charged back in Russia because what he did isn’t illegal there.

From Ananova.com: “Two teenagers discovered the world’s first internet bench could be used
to make free international calls and gave Microsoft boss Bill Gates a call.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “This year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo includes keynotes by Shane Robison, CTO and senior vice president of Compaq; Larry Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University and author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace; and Matthew Szulik, president and CEO of Red Hat, Inc. Ed Leonard, Head of Technology, DreamWorks Animation, will give a Feature Presentation titled, ;Linux for the Production Pipeline.’ The event will address how DreamWorks is implementing Linux in its feature film production.

To avoid standing in line, don’t forget to pre-register for the event on the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Web site. Media registration is available at http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/media.shtml.”

ZDNet reports that Sun Microsystems and a Linux training company, Cyber Source, have offered an Austrialian charity, PCs for Kids, free installations of Star Office and Red Hat Linux 6.2 after Microsoft has demanded license fees from the charity.