The Register: “The British Government once again voiced its commitment to the wired economy by
attempting to talk its European partners into overturning their commitment to outlaw
spam.

The Government, it seems, is happy for Net users to be bombarded with junk email
containing all manner of pornographic filth, scams, frauds, deceptions and
get-rich-quick schemes that prey on the vulnerable.

The Government is also happy that Net users pick up the tab for this pestering
intrusion. It’s their time online, their phone bill, their subscription costs – let punters
pay for it.

And all in the name of commercial freedom – because companies shouldn’t be
prevented from “connecting with their customers.””

BBC: “US computer firm Hewlett-Packard (HP) has pledged to fight a
German court decision to impose fees on its recordable compact
disc technology.

The Stuttgart district court ruled that Hewlett Packard would have
to pay a fee on every CD burner it sells in Germany, arguing that the
technology was being used to lift music off the internet in
contravention of artists’ copyright.”

CNET News.com: “The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has recommended two related specifications designed to
link pages written in Extensible Markup Language (XML). The first, XML Linking Language, or
XLink, became a candidate recommendation nearly a year ago and achieves its final
recommendation status more than six months past its scheduled approval.”

CNET News.com addresses key questions about the appeals court’s decision not to
break up software giant Microsoft.

EE Times: “A National Committee on Information Technology Standards
(NCITS) working group is pursuing a new protocol standard for the IEEE 1394 bus in a
bid to enable 1394-based “hybrid” storage devices that could efficiently handle both
computer data and audio/video streams.”

The Register: “The first major new office app for Apple’s Mac OS X made its debut quietly last
week, and as you can see from the screenshots below, it’s very lovely indeed. But
the Mesa spreadsheet actually has an interesting history in its own right. Paul
Lynch of P&L Systems in the UK, which publishes Mesa for OS X and has kept the
original NeXT version alive all these years, has an insight into the many twists and
turns of Apple’s OS strategy that’s isn’t often told. So indulge us.”

CNET News.com: “Napster is forcing people who want to trade music through its file-swapping site to upgrade
to a severely restricted version that allows trading of only a fraction of the songs
previously available.

As expected, people who signed onto the site Thursday morning were greeted with a message
telling them their older software would no longer work.

“All previous versions of Napster have been disabled,” the message says. “We’re making this
change as part of our ongoing effort to comply with the court’s orders.””

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/
Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org. This is the initial merge with 2.4.6pre – treat this one with care, it may
not be the most reliable 2.4.5ac release ever made

2.4.5-ac21
o       Fix pnpbios compile failure and add docking     (me)
        station hotplug (/sbin/hotplug dock)
o       Fix make xconfig failure                        (Keith Owens)
o       Fix cciss pci device table                      (Marcus Meissner)
o       Fix bogus math.h include in iphase driver       (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Reiserfs vm deadlock fix                        (Chris Mason)
o       Make the i810 tco disable info clearer          (Andrey Panin)
o       Correct bzImage size limit check                (Pavel Machek)
o       Next lvm patch                                  (Joe Thornber)
o       Fix toshoboe for pm api change                  (me)

Kelly McNeill writes “In the latest legal action aimed at Microsoft Corp., a digital-rights technology company has expanded its lawsuit against the software giant, alleging “willful infringement” of its patent in the Microsoft Windows Media Player and the Microsoft XP operating system.”

LinuxPR: ” Mission Critical Linux, Inc., the
industry leading Linux solutions and services company, and PowerQuest
Corporation, a provider of proven solutions for storage management, today
announced that they have cooperatively developed a storage protection and
recovery solution for the enterprise. The technology incorporates a Linux kernel
with PowerQuest’s imaging and recovery technology. This advance will allow
companies to back-up any server directly to DVD-RAM — enabling more
reliable backups and faster recovery than is available with tape backup.”