Wired reports on a US Supreme Court ruling which states that law enforcement needs a warrant to use its growing arsenal of high-tech surveillance equipment.

The Meta Group on CNet has predictions about slump in server sales. “Recent reports of slowing server sales are actually a trailing
indicator for the technology market.

The leading indicator was the reduction in IT budgets and general
delay in the release of new projects that has characterized user
planning and spending for the last two quarters. We expect the server market slump to continue
through the end of 2001 as the market digests the infrastructure growth of 1999-2000 and projects
continue to be delayed.”

From PR Newswire: J.D. Edwards
& Company (Nasdaq: JDEC) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans to develop
and jointly market a specialized IBM eServer designed to run J.D. Edwards’
collaborative commerce software for small to medium businesses.

The IBM eServer for J.D. Edwards will be pre-configured to run HTML, Java
or Linux.

CNet reprots that “Microsoft’s latest software fix for a security hole in the company’s Exchange mail server
may still be causing problems.”

LinuxHardware.org has the review: “Hardware prices have fallen to the point where a complete budget minded
system can be had for less than $400 US. With so many good processor
choices out there, it can be difficult to find the best value. AMD’s Duron
processor is only a slightly “dummied down” version of their
top-of-the-line Thunderbird. With such a small difference in capability and
an improportionate difference in cost, is paying for a Thunderbird really
worth it?”

IDG reports on another Gartner Group study, this one saying, “Consumers should expect a big battle between the Net titans
over new platforms such as media players and IM services.”

CNet reports on the supposedly soon-to-be-released Netscape 6.1.

DebianPlanet has an item saying there will be a new site for Debian KDE
packages with a round of 2.1.x packages for Potato comiing
soon. More information at http://kde.debian.net/.

From LWN.net: Luki R. reported a bug in man-db: it did handle nested calls of
drop_effective_privs() and regain_effective_privs() correctly which
would cause it to regain privileges to early. This could be abused
to make man create files as user man.

This has been fixed in version 2.3.16-4, and we recommend that you
upgrade your man-db package immediately.

USENIX Association writes,
BSDCon 2002
February 11-14, 2002
Cathedral Hill Hotel
San Francisco, CA. USA
http://www.usenix.org/events/bsdcon02/. The premier conference for the BSD community!

The Berkeley Software Distributions (BSDs) represent one of the oldest and most vigorous streams of Open Source Development. Together, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and BSD/OS represent millions of servers and desktops. The BSDs have long been part of the backbones of the Internet, in everything from embedded applications to large server installations, and will soon be widely deployed on consumer desktops. If you want to develop cutting-edge network applications, then BSDCon is the place to be. Meet all the movers and shakers of the BSD community, and learn how you can use BSD as part of your enterprise-grade solutions.

This is the third BSDCon, but the first to be sponsored by the USENIX Association. Two days of tutorials will precede two days of technical sessions and a vendor exhibit. The combination of technical tracks, invited talks, tutorials, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, and Work-in-Progress reports provides an opportunity for people of all experience levels to learn from BSD experts, professionals with real world experience, and industry leaders.

The BSDCon 2002 Program Committee invites you to contribute your ideas, proposals and papers for the invited talks program, refereed papers track, and Work-in-Progress Reports related to BSD-derived systems and the Open Source world.

Suggested topics and guidelines are now available at: http://www.usenix.org/events/bsdcon02/cfp/

Submissions are due August 27, 2001.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco in February 2002!

The 2002 BSDCon Conference is sponsored by
USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association.