EE Times reports that researchers in Cambridge, England, have come up with a single-electron memory bit, reducing the physical size and electricity usage of the memory.

Business Week reports on the competition between Microsoft and AOL Time Warner — in China, noting the edge AOLTW has over Microsoft with a recent partnership.

ZDNet explains what the effect of Compaq’s transfer of alpha technology to Intel will be on the server chip market, noting that the change will effect Sun and Intel more than it will Compaq.

Kelly McNeill writes “Explaining the GPL in terms that a non-technical person can understand has always been difficult. It’s even hard for a technical person to understand the ramifications of the license, which have more to do with the principles of intellectual property rights management than the intricacies of software development. What does it mean for software to be free, and how does that affect my ability to use a certain piece of software as part of anything else I’m working on?”

VNUnet.com has a story saying security professionals are concerned that a program used by crackers to exploit a flaw in Microsoft IIS webserver has not been
made public, and that this may mean further damaging IIS attacks.

OK, you can see more accurate story here at NewsForge, but here’s CNet/ZDNet’s take on the network outage.

ZDNet reports that the U.S. Defense Information Agency has ordered up to 25,000 copies of StarOffice to use on its Unix workstations.

Interactive Week has a column saying Microsoft’s once-laughable bogeyman, the “kid in a garage,” isn’t taking down the company, but other forces are. “In the enterprise, the open source threat will clearly keep growing. In fact, expect it to accelerate
as increasingly more Fortune 1000 companies embrace not just myriad open source Internet
solutions, but the killer app of open source — the Linux operating system. With Linux threatening
to overtake Windows as a server OS, Microsoft is clearly desperate to come up with a
penguin-killing bullet. But much of its railing against open source on intellectual property
grounds seemed specious last week, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft had
incorporated open source code in its own software and was largely dependent on open source
solutions in some of its Web services.”

Posted at LWN.net: “New updated XFree86 3.3.6 packages are available for Red Hat Linux 7.1,
7.0, and 6.2 which contain many security updates, bug fixes, and updated
drivers for various different families of video hardware including:

S3 Savage, S3 Trio64, S3 ViRGE, Intel i810/i815, ATI Rage Mobility Mach64,
and numerous other driver fixes and improvements.”

Slashdot readers talk about OpenBSD’s move to pf, a new packet filter.