Kelly McNeill writes: “After reading about the Microsoft appellate court ruling last week, I was surprised to hear so many individuals believed the ruling was a Microsoft victory. Shortly after the ruling was announced, I received scads of e-mails coupled with the occasional phone call. Most of these communications were about how much of an injustice it was that Microsoft got off scot-free. People were wondering how much further the technology industry must be degraded before anyone in charge acknowledges how inappropriate Microsoft’s behavior had been over the past 15 years.”

PCWorld: “If you were in the market for a personal computer back in 1980, you had plenty of choices. Many
popular models of the day ran an operating system from Digital Research called CP/M. Commodore’s
PET and Tandy/Radio Shack’s TRS-80 were also established players. And two guys named Steve had
a big business selling the Apple II.”

eeTimes.com: “A Chinese graduate student is offering freely downloadable source code for
the description of a synthesizable processor core claimed to be compatible with the
ARM7 32-bit RISC processor developed by ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England).
The core is available through the OpenCores Web site.

Although the core is a student project and unlikely to hurt ARM’s position as a leading
supplier of RISC microprocessors, its availability could be seen to undermine ARM’s
control of its architecture.”

ZDNET: “Got an e-mail from your
grandmom advertising the services of an adult Web site?
Don’t get mad – her computer’s been infected by the
spamming trojan virus.”

Dallas News: “Napster has taken the unprecedented step of suspending its online music-swapping service because it is unable to stop the unauthorized exchange of songs. Napster discovered its users continue to trade bootlegged songs, despite technological safeguards put in place to comply with a court order mandating it halt the practice.”

CNET: “The Free Standards Group released version 1.0 of the Linux Standard Base specification Friday,
a move aimed at reducing the difficulties of getting software such as Oracle’s database to run on
versions of Linux from Red Hat, Debian, SuSE and others.”

The Dot: “Kent Nguyen has written a very nice and entertaining review of KWord as part of a more extensive KOffice examination. With the help of an alter-ego or two, as well
as some editorial guidance from Tina of Newsforge, Kent covers everything from KWord
frames to component embedding and groupware features, with more than a few illustrative screenshots.
Over the next few weeks, look forward to Kent’s reviews of KSpread, KIllu, KPresenter, Kivio, and Krayon.”

O’Reilly.net: “Noel Davis shows us buffer overflows in the GazTek HTTP Daemon, Solaris Printer Daemon, and w3m; a problem in default SAMBA installations that can be used to gain root access; and problems in Cisco 6400 NRP2, udirectory, Tarantella, Oracle 8i SQLNet, Formmail.pl, OS X directory permissions, and kdesu.”

Kelly McNeill writes: “Many industry observers believe the Newton, the groundbreaking handheld organizer from Apple Computer and one of the company’s buried treasures, was an intriguing and revolutionary failure. At the same time, we still want a new Apple personal digital assistant (PDA) to take its place. Rumors of an iPhone, an iPad, or an Apple-branded Palm OS machine predictably surface whenever a large Apple event looms on the horizon.”

The BBC reports that a Kuiper belt object approximately the size of Pluto’s moon Charon has been discovered. The Kuiper belt is the region of space immediately beyond Pluto.