The Industry Standard reports that the U.S. Department of Commerce has closed the bidding for proposals to manage the .us top-level Internet domain. The winner of the contract stands to make millions from registration and licensing fees by marketing .us addresses to a wider audience. The DoC’s process has come under fire from a variety of political, technical, and municipal sources who see .us as a vital public resource that should not be commercialized.

Pirated copies of “American Pie 2” are making the rounds of Internet file sharing services, says this Reuters report on CNET. A full two weeks before the movie is slated to hit the screens in the U.S., the film can be found on Hotline servers around the world in compressed DivX format. No comment from distributor Universal Studios, but it’s a safe bet they’re not thrilled with this development.

As far as Trusecure president and CEO Adam Joseph is concerned, security companies that want to be taken seriously simply don’t hire hackers. “We try not to hire current or former hackers. The kind of companies
we deal with, such as financial institutions, don’t like to trust their
expertise to someone involved in criminal activity,” he said. Story at Vnunet.

Help Net Security has word of a serious issue with PHPnuke: “After testing just a few scripts on phpnuke I have noticed the following:

Some fields in the registration form allow code

and fail to filter out the tags.

e.g Interests: src=http://www.anything.com/defaced.gif>

Also when faking a form and posting from local file (user.php.html) after editing a few
fields like the avatar picture for example, it is possible to escape surtain dirs with the
../../../../dir/pic.gif in the options field.”

Here’s an announcement from the front page of Yet Another Society, a non-profit devoted to the advancement of collaborative efforts in computer and information science: “Today at the Open Source Software Convention Kevin Lenzo announced a new foundation is being created
between these Perl communities. Coming together gives a clear place for support and development of Perl. Not
only does this have the blessing of the Perl elders (Larry has agreed to be on the board) but there is corporate
interest from the community which recognizes the importance of Perl and free software. YAS will continue the effort
for Perl development grants as it has in the past. We will be setting up a vehicle to accept funding, but we still
need your active volunteer participation as well. All the details are still being worked on, and you can watch this
site for more information as it becomes available.”

Microsoft executives made soothing noises at this week’s Open Source Conference in San Diego. While Craig Mundie spoke softly about the “software ecosystem” and Microsoft’s concerns about the GNU Public License and its own shared source initiatives, Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann fired back, calling shared source nothing more than a treaty designed to quell Microsoft’s internal civil war. From ZDNet News.

– By Dan Berkes –
Nasdaq stood still and the Dow dropped a bit this Friday as investors tried to improve their outlook on long-term financial gains. MandrakeSoft clarified its Euronext IPO, HP slashed its staff and earnings forecast, and we’re not quite sure what TiVo is doing.
Nasdaq ended the week at 2,029.07, up by 6 points from Thursday but essentially going nowhere from last Friday’s close of 2,029.37. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down almost 39 points from Thursday to 10,416.67, off 160 points from its July 20 closing at 10,576.65.

Investors are doing their best to remain optimistic about future corporate returns, but it’s not an easy task. Earlier, the Street was rocked by big selloffs when the herd was spooked by news of continued poor results. Leading the way in the tech sector, as you’ll read further on in this week’s report, was Hewlett-Packard’s news of fresh job cuts and lowered profit estimates for the current quarter. Eventually, the markets rebounded, with analysts predicting an even milder upturn next week.

MandrakeSoft goes IPO
MandrakeSoft has begun an initial public offering, expecting to raise a modest $3.7 million for its efforts. This is a significant business event for the Linux community; in the past few months several high-profile Open Source players including Lineo, LynuxWorks, Linuxcare, and Turbolinux have canceled their plans to go public. MandrakeSoft will trade on the unregulated Euronext Marche Libre. Belgian bank KBC Securities is underwriting the offering.

So, how do you go about getting in on this IPO? That’s something you’ll have to figure out on your own, or maybe with the help of a few Mandrake fans. On Thursday, the company sent out an email message asking readers for help in assembling a HOWTO document that will describe how to purchase shares of MandrakeSoft from various countries.

Caldera and an order of fries, please
Rumor has it that Caldera just got one super-size order from McDonalds. According to sources, the company received an order for 4,000 OpenUnix licenses from the U.S. hamburger titan. The company plans to use its new software to crunch financial information across its global chain of restaurants. Look for an official announcement sometime in the next few weeks.

HP’s gloomy news
The layoffs continue in Silicon Valley, and the company delivering this week’s round of bad news was Hewlett-Packard. The tech giant said it will slash 6,000 positions from the company payroll, or about 6 percent of its workforce. This brings the total job cuts announced by HP to 10,700, and the company left open the possibility that more staff reductions would come.

HP said the layoffs are due to consumers spending less on technology, and followed company warnings that its third-quarter results would be even worse than it previously expected. Company chairwoman Carly Fiorina said she expects 3Q revenues to decline to 14 percent, down from 16 percent for the same quarter during 2000. HP’s current quarter will end on July 31.

On Thursday, the day of the announcement, HWP volume hit a recent record volume of more than 16 million, up by over 10 million for the previous day and far outpacing any recent volume the stock has seen. Shareholders rushing to market on Thursday closed HWP down 1.68 from the previous day to an even 24. On Friday, a minor rebound saw shares up slightly to 24.36, down 2.06 from last Friday’s close.

EBIZ licks its wounds
Ailing Linux commerce portal and systems builder EBIZ Enterprises is doing a little better this week. The company saw its stock hit an all-time low earlier this month after CEO David Shaw wrote a letter to shareholders, saying the company was in danger of closing without immediate additional funding. While no signs of that funding have yet appeared, EBIZ.OB has bounced back from its all-time low of 0.07 on July 11 to close out this week of business at 0.25.

Borland vs. WebGain
On Monday, Borland Software International filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against competing development toolmaker WebGain. The suit alleges that several of WebGain’s products, including VisualCafe and StructureBuilder, infringe on seven different Borland patents. The company seeks monetary damages and an injunction preventing WebGain from further distribution of those software titles. Borland’s suit was filed in response to an action brought against Borland by WebGain, which asks the court to rule that its products do not infringe upon Borland patents and furthermore, that those patents are invalid.

Borland stock received a stabilizing shot in the arm this Friday when investment firm Adams, Harkness, and Hill initiated coverage for BORL, advising its clients that the company was a “strong buy.” Shares closed Friday at 13.86, down .0.59 from Thursday and 1.13 from its Monday peak of 14.99, but doing a bit better than this Wednesday’s low of 13.60.

What is TiVo up to?
On Tuesday, TiVo Inc. gave notice that it plans to sell $50 million to $75 million worth of securities to accredited investors, or, as the press release says: “… aggregate principal amount of convertible subordinated notes with common stock warrants in a private placement.”

Draw your own conclusions, perhaps a snippet from this week’s 8K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission might help: “America Online, Inc. has the right, under certain conditions, including our failure to have a positive net cash position of more than
$25 million as measured at the end of each of our fiscal quarters, to require us to repurchase that number of shares of our Series A convertible preferred stock held by
America Online having a liquidation value equal to the amount of restricted funds then held in escrow for this purpose, pursuant to an escrow agreement between us
and America Online.”

Here’s how selected Open Source and related technology stocks ended the week:

Company Name	Symbol	7/27 Close	7/20 Close
Apple	AAPL	18.96	19.98
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	13.86	14.70
Caldera International	CALD	0.80	0.92
EBIZ Enterprises	EBIZ.OB	0.25	0.115
Hewlett-Packard	HWP	24.36	26.42
IBM	IBM	104.70	105.70
Merlin Software Tech.	MLSW.OB	0.25	0.26
Red Hat	RHAT	4.01	3.40
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	16.29	15.03
TiVo	TIVO	7.03	7.50
VA Linux Systems	LNUX	1.80	2.15
Wind River Systems	WIND	14.62	15.17

From a press release at LinuxPR: “LinuxCertified.com, a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend system
administration bootcamp on August 4-5, 2001 in San Francisco bay area (south
bay). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and
is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.”

Internet.com: “Online data storage firm OTG Software, Inc.
(NASDAQ:OTGS) has acquired UniTree Software, Inc., a
provider of UNIX and Linux-based data storage and
database storage management solutions, for
approximately $20 million. Under the terms of the deal,
OTG will pay $6 million in cash with the balance in
common stock and promissory notes. The acquisition is
expected to be neutral to combined financial statements
in 2001, and “nominally” accretive to the combined
financial statements by the end of 2002.”

Alan Cox announces the release of Linux kernel 2.4.7ac2. Read on for the usual links and informative changelog.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/

                 Intermediate diffs are available from
                       http://www.bzimage.org


2.4.7-ac2
o       Update motion eye driver, fix stack and hang    (Hugh Dickins)
        problems
o       Fix sigsuspend bug on Alpha                     (Richard Henderson)
o       CRIS port updates                               (Bjorn Wesen)
o       Add support for Win2K dynamic disk partitions   (Richard Russon,
                                                         Anton Altaparmakov)
o       ISDN multilink fix                              (Karsten Keil)
o       HFC PCI support is now ITU approved             (Werner Cornelius)
o       Update sonypi driver                            (Stelian Pop)
o       Fix sleep with irq disabled bug in act2000      (Kai Germaschewski)
o       Farsync driver cleanups                         (Bob Dunlop)
o       Remove surplus tty==NULL checks in isdn tty     (Rob Radez,
                                                         Kai Germaschewski)
o       Remove sleep with irq disabled in icn driver    (Kai Germaschewski)
o       Remove sleep with irq disabled bug in isdnloop  (Kai Germaschewski)
o       Remove bcopy and duplicate snprintf from eicon  (me)
        driver
o       Remove bzero from eicon driver, use skb_purge   (Armin Schindler)
o       Updated NinjaScsi driver                        (YOKOTA Hiroshi)
o       Fix a jffs2 memory leak                         (David Woodhouse)
o       Updated bttv driver. Corruption on close fixes  (Gerd Knorr)
o       Audio driver for bt878 tv chip onboard audio    (Gerd Knorr)
o       Correct nvram byte range limit                  (Aaron Rendahl)
o       Include linux/smp_lock in shmem                 (Clemens)
o       Add DMI/apm support for broken bioses reporting (Marc Boucher)
        battery life wrong endian
o       Fix dumb bug in the sbf code                    (me)
o       Fix pnp shutdown oops                           (me)