ZDNet: “Unlike the electrical outages plaguing California, which no one wants, this intentional blackout suited the
purposes of one side in the collapse of talks between two major Internet service providers, Cable & Wireless and
the financially strapped PSINet. A critical link between the two networks was cut, blocking some companies
from seeing their own Web sites, and stalling e-mail between thousands of sources.”

Josh Black writes “The latest grant cycle for LinuxFund.org has just come to a close. This round we have chosen 5 projects to be funded a total amount of $5,000. The projects funded for this round are:

GNUpdate Christian Hammond

OpenDecoder Andrew Henderson

Leviathan Project: A GNU Library System Donald Cowart

Ocularis JP Schnapper Casteras

Simple DirectMedia Layer Sam Lantinga

For detailed descriptions of these projects please visit our website: http://www.linuxfund.org. LinuxFund.org is a non-profit organization that funds open source developments by raising money through its official LinuxFund.org creditcard. Please submit any project ideas by completing a grant application on our website and sign up for the credit card today and help support the Linux community.”

osOpinion: “In reality, open-source software does not require you to give up all your
intellectual property to the public, and it can be a viable — even vital —
part of a business. In this article, I’ll examine several of the myths
contained in Ballmer’s comments, address their corresponding realities,
and provide real-world examples of how companies have used
open-source code to push their enterprise forward.”

From Slashdot: “In 1999, Internet Pictures Corporation (IPIX) started
persecuting anyone who made software to produce 360° images. They succeeded
in forcing Professor Helmut Dersch, the creator of the GPL Panorama Tools to
remove certain functionality from his software. Well, they’re at it again. They have
now forced him to shut his website. IPIX hold several US patents on remapping fisheye images, and first
went after US sites that linked to the PanoTools site. Prof Dersch says he may now have to distribute
his software using tricks similar to those needed by GIMP to avoid the Unisys GIF patents.”

From The Register: “Microsoft has officially responded to claims made by security consultant Steve
Gibson that Windows XP threatens the stability of the Internet thanks to its inclusion
on Unix sockets. These ‘raw’ sockets allow hackers to send thousands of spoof data
packets from several PCs at once and launch unstoppable denial-of-service
attacks against chosen Web sites.”

It’s posted at LWN.net. Among the items: “Prepping for 0.7.6:

As the number of minor fixes has grown, and some additional
functionality has been rolled in, we’re about to package, release,
and announce OpenNMS 0.7.6.

We’re going to classify 0.7.6 as a minor bug-fix, minor feature
enhancement release, and the only real reason for its existence is
that there are some kinda cool things in CVS that we’d like to get
tested prior to 0.8.0.”

CNet reports on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s filing of a lawsuit Wednesday for a group of
scientists from Princeton and Rice universities, “asking that the professors be allowed to
publish research on anti-copying technology despite protests from the entertainment
industry.” More from Wired.com.

SecurityPortal.com has a story about Apache.org’s recent security difficulties and says it’s a matter being able to trust the people you work with. “An example of this would be developers logging into the primary Apache.org development
machine from remote locations. The SSH protocol is used to secure these connections with
strong encryption, which provides a tunnel between the two communicating machines.
Furthermore, it is assumed that the end developer’s machine is secure, and that there are no
keystroke loggers running, or items like KeyGhost hooked up to the machine. Herein lies a
problem. More and more people are using machines that are not always secure or should not be
considered ‘trusted.’ “

Anonymous Reader writes, “The news that Napster has come to an agreement with three of the record labels and their new MusicNet sevice is not all that surprising. Once it was acquired by Bertelsmann AG it became part of the traditional music industry. The problem is it looks like to subscribe to the new Napster you will first be required to subscribe to the over-priced MusicNet. We simply can’t see what will compel anyone to allow themselves to be so overcharged for a service now geared to serve the politics of the recording industry over the needs of the consumer.” The story’s at mp3newswire.net.

The BBC reports on a Czech company that is “proving that there are novel uses for the
machine.

Prague-based Blokman Trading has developed a version of the
popular Linux operating system for the console that turns it into a
low-powered desktop computer.”