Slashdot reviews Eric Rescorla’s book, SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems: “Two words: Horse’s mouth. Rescorla is the author of RFC’s 2659, 2660 and 2818 (HTTP over TLS).
Also the Java PureTLS toolkit (free), ssldump (free), some commercial toolkits and parts of Nokia’s SSL
offload boxes. In short, he knows his stuff and it shows.”

Wired News reports on Palm’s new Bluetooh gadget, an insertable card that will enable wireless connections between its ubiquitous handhelds and nearby devices that also support the protocol. Alas: “Much like other Bluetooth-enabled products, many still bogged down in development or held up for extended fine-tuning the new Palm Bluetooth Card isn’t slated to hit the market until late fall.”

ZDNet UK reports that a preview version of the Oracle’s next-generation 9i database is available for free download from that company’s Web site. The “developer” version is available for Solaris and HP-UX operating systems. The new database is scheduled for an official release next Thursday.

“After claiming last month that the open source model is flawed, and “responsible for
releasing unhealthy code,” Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie is set to debate
the issue at an open-source conference in July.” Full story from ZDNet UK.

From Slashdot: “Andrew Tridgell devised an ethernet for the TiVo a few months ago,
but decided not to post any of his vide extraction software, in fear of a Napster-like
backlash against TiVo (some of the legal implications were directly discussed in a
recent slashdot interview). But, today, MPEG extraction has been released in the TiVo
underground, although rough around the edges, it allows the user to view TiVo recordings on any PC in
the LAN in real time, as well as save the mpeg2 recordings on your PC.”

– By Grant Gross –

As the New Jersey Devils and the Colorado Avalanche face off for the National Hockey League
championship, the Linux Tuxes have beaten the Windows NT Paper Clips at NHL.com.

The NHL’s official Web site recently
switched its foundation from NT to Linux, NHL partner IBM announced today.

No one from NHL.com was available for comment, but a press release from IBM says site administrators
switched to Linux to improve performance at the high-traffic, media-rich site. NHL.com is averaging about 1.5 million
page views a day during the ongoing Stanley Cup finals, and the site’s broadband section,
featuring videos of game highlights and player histories, is popular with fans.

The press release quoted Peter DelGiacco, vice president of information technology at the NHL, as saying:
“We wanted to be sure our Web site met the needs of our fans,
particularly during high volume periods such as the Stanley Cup. Adding Linux to our
site architecture has dramatically improved our manageability and
reliability. We can now more easily evolve the site as NHL.com continues to grow in popularity.”

Jeff Jones, senior program manager for IBM data management solutions, says NHL.com’s decision to switch
to Linux was prompted by a
long-standing e-commerce relationship between IBM and the NHL.
The site now runs Red Hat Linux version 7.0 on its existing IBM database servers running AIX.
NHL.com’s systems will include a Linux-cluster consisting of five IBM Intel-based servers
functioning as the Web server. Two IBM Intel-based servers will power
the site’s search engine and chat functions, with two IBM Unix servers running the
back-end database operation using IBM DB2 software.

Jones, whose department’s DB2 product runs on both Linux and Windows, hesitated to compare
the two, but noted the recent
DB2/Linux database benchmark victory over SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2000.

According to IBM, NHL.com site managers weren’t happy with the reliability, scalability and broadband
capability of their site under NT, so they completed an exhaustive site review, leading to the switch to Linux
and a change of Internet service providers.

“What this represents for Linux is another very visible customer who’s betting its day-to-day online Web
business on Linux,” Jones says. “The message here is that Linux is being trusted by more and more
commercial customers as something that can really scale and they can bet their businesses on. This is proving
that Linux is more than just a hacker’s system or something limited to the markets of academia and ISPs.”

For more information, check out the press release at InternetWire.

The Register says a vote in the U.K. for the Labour Party is a vote from Microsoft, because the huge tech company has Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ear.

Wired.com has the story asking what exactly was Frank Quattrone’s role as head of Credit Suisse First Boston’s technology group? “CSFB — as well as almost every other major investment bank
on Wall Street — is facing a slew of private shareholder
lawsuits and a suit by a former client over IPO allocations.
The banks are also under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s
office in Manhattan, the Securities and Exchange Commission
and the National Association of Securities Dealers.”

The summary of traffic on the python-dev mailing list between
May 24 and June 7 is posted at LWN.net.

The Register reports that the Open Source Jabber instant message project has partnered with voice Web provider Nuance. The deal could mean voice-to-IM technology and vice versa.