KDE dot reports that the KDE 2.2 release schedule has been udpated as the release goes into a feature-freeze.

LinuxSecurity warns that RedHat 7.1’s vipw utility leaves /etc/shadow world-readable. /etc/shadow is the file which contains the encrypted passwords for all users on the system.

– by Tina Gasperson –
KIllustrator, the Open Source counterpart to Adobe Inc.’s widely popular Illustrator program, has been under fire recently, ever since rumors of threats from Adobe lawyers circulated on the ‘Net. NewsForge has obtained a short official statement from Adobe concerning the conflict.NewsForge made many attempts to contact Adobe when the news first broke that Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler, owner of KIllustrator, was shutting the project down because of a darkly worded missive from Adobe headquarters. According to early reports, some demand for monetary compensation was made, and Sattler believed that Adobe wanted no less than the death of KIllustrator as penance for Sattler’s alleged trademark violation.

While NewsForge had no reason to disbelieve any reports coming from German sites with connections to Sattler and KIllustrator, we felt it was important to get confirmation from the source of the controversy. Late last week, we were finally able to speak with an Adobe representative, who in turn contacted company higher-ups and got her hands on an official statement from the makers of the Illustrator software:

"Adobe's primary interest in this issue is to protect its trademark rights
and goodwill associated with its Illustrator product. Adobe has no
intention of requiring Dr. Sattler to cease distribution of his product or
pay Adobe any fees, only to change the name of his software. Unfortunately,
the matter was not handled the way Adobe intended. We have contacted Dr.
Sattler and are committed to working out an amicable solution to this
matter."

It appears that Adobe is not a kissing cousin to some other proprietary behemoths, but is simply attempting to protect its trademark.

Earlier today, a reader sent us an email from the kdeve list saying that KIllustrator had changed its name to Kontour.

Wired.com has a story about Jamie Zawinski, an ex-Netscape coder, opening the DNA nightclub in San Francisco, after spending two years and all kinds of money refurbishing it.
“As delayed and over-budget as this project was,” Zawinski
told Wired.com, “it still shipped before Mozilla.”

CNet has a short item about Jabber releasing Version 1.8 of its Open Source instant messenger client written in XML.

From TechReview.com: “Got a few choice
thoughts about what
you see on the
Web? Enter
Annotea, a new
technology that lets
you annotate existing
Web documents with
commentary of your
own.

Annotea is an
open-source
initiative sponsored
by the non-profit
World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C),
the closest thing the
Internet has to a
governing body. Built
into W3C’s Amaya
browser, Annotea
allows third parties to
append information
to existing Web
pages.”

feder tells us about a story from InformationWeek: “Cray’s former chief architect for massively parallel processor systems, Steve Oberlin, is president and CEO of Unlimited Scale Inc. Working out of his home in Chippewa Falls, Wis., and employing fewer than a dozen former Cray colleagues in South St. Paul, Minn., Oberlin says his new company, formed last year, aims to build a Linux architecture for scaling supercomputers made of low-cost nodes.”

Network World Fusion has a confusing story about Sun rolling out a critical customer service application for handhelds on Linux.

Kelly McNeill writes, “Not long ago, a Microsoft ad campaign asked where consumers wanted to go. That slogan came back to me the other day, after Microsoft’s latest shipment of propaganda landed, this time aimed squarely at that supposed grave threat to civilization and progress, the GNU software license. Of course the GNU project and its license have been around for well over a decade, but a few of its offspring have recently surpassed Microsoft products in terms of total market share and/or growth rate. Now, Microsoft accuses GNU of threatening the global economy. Coincidence?” The column’s at osOpinion.

Slashdot has a Q&A with IBM executive Scott Handy about IBM’s plans for Linux.