Interactive Week has a story saying Microsoft is stumbling in the interactive TV market, with Linux-based Liberate Technologies challenging the tech giant.

EE Times reports that IMEC has developed an FPGA-based
camera system, using Linux, in which both hardware and software modules can be
reconfigured over the Internet while the camera is operating.

eWeek reports that with Microsoft’s use of smart tags and other technologies in the forthcoming
Windows XP, “legal experts say the company is practicing the same types of
behavior that got it in trouble in the first place.”

LinuxToday posts a strongly-worded e-mail from Martin Baulig the gnome-hackers mailing list, announcing his plans to resign his GNOME 2.0 release coordinator position. Excerpt: “Suddenly, I’m now the bad guy and I get flamed from almost everybody, so it’s time for me
to face the truth and see that my work on GNOME 2 is no longer appreciated.

At the moment, I don’t see any reason why I should do any further work on libgnome or
libgnomeui, this will only make more people even more angry and doesn’t buy us anything.”

Zack Brown posts the latest edition of Kernel Traffic. Hot topics on the mailing list include: “Status of 2.4 virtual memory subsystem”, “Automatic bug hunter”, and “Commercial patches.”

In the latest issue of Linux Security Digest, from SecurityPortal: “endors playing catchup, probably the big news is a bug in xinetd
that can result in a variety of problems, if your vendor has issued
updates (i.e. Red Hat and Immunix) and you are using xinetd’s
logging you should upgrade immediately. If you are using Red Hat
at all for that matter there are a large number of packages you
need to be upgrading, including ispell, samba, minicom and a few
others. Apart from that a relatively quiet week in Linux land.”

An anonymous reader pointed us in the direction of this item at LinuxDevices.com: “In a press conference today, Compaq announced an application contest for Linux-based
handheld devices for the purpose of “[driving] development and adoption of Linux applications on handheld
devices such as the Compaq iPAQ.” Five finalists and one grand prize winner will be announced at
LinuxWorld in August 2001.”

Linux Planet: “I don’t think people who are Linux users are escaping away from something–they are running to something. Because Linux is
something that represents more than just lines of code for people. Linux represents something that they can help build. From the
developers who code the kernel to the beginning user who tentatively types out a bug report, everyone who has used Linux for
any amount of time has the ability to help create something that is larger than anything they could have done on their own.”

Topics in this edition of weekly Tcl news and links include a request for a volunteer to monitor Web sites for Tcl-related software, a pointer to papers presented at the Second European Tcl/Tk User Meeting, and Tcl install shell version 1.2. Posted at LinuxProgramming.com.

ORBS — the relay-blocking anti-spam service run from New Zealand by Alan Brown — is dead. Long live ORBS, er, ORBZ, the Open Relay Blocking Zone run from the UK by Paul Cummins. Then there’s Michael Rawls’ ORBL, the Open Relay Black List. The Register makes sense of it all.