In another step towards protecting people from using computers themselve, the Australian Government has decreed that only they may have network probing tools, and only they may use network probing tools. Slashdot has full details (and a large discussion).

Craig writes “The wide spread adoption of Linux on the desktop depends on many different factors. Like pieces of a puzzle fitting together and the whole being greater than anyone piece. One of those pieces is Shawn Gorton of The Kompany. A lot of press over the last 8 or so months has been given to the folks at Ximian who have given us Redcarpet and Evolution. Well the folks on the kde side of the trench haven’t been exactly dormant. The Kompany has been busy bring some very needed applications to the desktop. A few of the wider known choices are Aethera, Kapital and Kivio. When the dust settles and Linux’s desktop postion is realized, we will come too see that The Kompany was a very large piece of that puzzle. You can find the rest here“

Craig writes, “The wide spread adoption of Linux on the desktop depends on many different factors. Like pieces of a puzzle fitting together and the whole being greater than anyone piece. One of those pieces is Shawn Gorton of The Kompany. A lot of press over the last 8 or so months has been given to the folks at Ximian who have given us Redcarpet and Evolution. Well the folks on the kde side of the trench haven’t been exactly dormant. The Kompany has been busy bring some very needed applications to the desktop. A few of the wider known choices are Aethera, Kapital, and Kivio. When the dust settles and Linux’s desktop postion is realized, we will come too see that The Kompany was a very large piece of that puzzle. You can find the rest here at GUI-Lords.org.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “Matthew Harris’ last case as a practicing lawyer was as lead
technical litigator in the Caldera antitrust case against
Microsoft which ended up with Microsoft making a large payment
to Caldera. After reviewing the recent Supreme Court decision
in the US vs. Microsoft antitrust case, Harris (who now serves
as Lineo’s Chief Operating Officer) has decided the decision
represents a significant victory for the software industry. Read this guest editorial by Harris at LinuxDevices.com.”

“Drop out various bits that are 2.5 stuff…”

Linux 2.4.6-ac2
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 16:50:50 +0100 (BST)
From: Alan Cox 
To: editors@newsforge.com


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

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


2.4.6-ac2
o        Merge Linus 2.4.7pre1
o        Drop out various bits that are 2.5 stuff
         AS/400 etc
o        Merge Linus 2.4.7pre2
o        Merge Linus 2.4.7pre3
o        Handle strange USB descriptors in CDCEther      (Brad Hards,
         | Fixe Motorola SB4100 cable modem              Jason Purdy)

o        Experimentally add aha1505 isapnp support       (Peter Samuelson)
o        Fix SMP race in buffer.c                        (Andrew Morton)
o        Fix fs/sysv/dir.c link mishandling              (Al Viro)
o        D-Link 2000 Gigabit ethernet driver             (Edward Peng)
o        EEPro100 fixes                                  (Kai Germaschewski)
o        Radeon frame buffer driver updates              (Ani Joshi)
o        Incorrect PPC irq assignment fix                (Paul Mackerras)
o        Fix usb scanner ioctl error return              (Paul Mackerras)
o        Fix ohci ppc build                              (Paul Mackerras)
o        Avoid oom handler firing excessively early      (Rik van Riel)
o        Fix imsttfb build bug                           (Paul Mackerras)
o        Add another kaweth ethernet id                  (Fumiaki OHATA)
o        i810 audio driver updates                       (Doug Ledford)
o        Vm86 sti handling fixup                                 (Stas Sergeev)
o        Fix non pnpbios build                           (Steve Cole)
o        Remove SGML short forms from video docs                 (Erik Mouw)
o        Pnp comments change for remove op               (Jeff Garzik)
o        Revert epic100 MII change                       (Jeff Garzik)
o        Update Jes maintainer info                      (Jes Sorensen)
o        Add test shared irq support to fdomain driver   (me)
o        Add mising DQUOT_INIT in inode.c                (Al Viro)
o        Fix device locking leak in pppoe        (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o        Clean up the pnpbios BIOS calling code          (Brian Gerst)
o        Configure.help updates                          (Eric Raymond)
o        Don't autoload parport_serial in parport        (Tim Waugh)
o        Update atyfb                                    (Geert Uytterhoeven)
o        Fix procfs reporting of ataraid                         (Arjan van de Ven)
o        Upate ATP870u driver to handle the new          (Wittman Lee)
         6760 U160 hardware
o        Further ALi trident driver updates              (Matt Wu)

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Microsoft’s instant-messaging service has been inaccessible to a third of its users for three days. Microsoft is blaming the problem on a hardware failure, but a similar incident several months ago eventually turned out to be a security compromise.

The Standard reports on a bill before the house in the state of California which would require companies to reveal secrets about defects in their products, while protecting so-called trade secrets. Though the article doesn’t say so, this could have repercussions in the tech world as it could force software manufacturers to reveal potentially dangerous bugs in their systems.

ZDNet reports that IBM is planning to refocus its display business on high-resolution flat-panel monitors. The announcement comes from a deal IBM made with Taiwanese-based Chi Mei Optoelectronics to replace its previous arrangement with Japanese-based Toshiba.

CNet reports on a project to use GPS to complement seismographs in earth movement tracking and earthquake prediction.

LinuxSecurity.com reports on the last week of security advisories for Linux, including security advisories for samba, xinetd, zope, scotty, and webadmin.