Reuters at Yahoo: “Napster is close to a deal to license music from three of the world’s major recording companies who are currently involved in a landmark copyright lawsuit to shut the company’s existing version of its song-swap service down, sources familiar with the situation said.”

The Register: “Novell has downplayed the significance of a NetWare 5.x bug which could result in
an admin password being left in plain text on a server. Crackers, it says, would not
be able to access the relevant file in the first place.”

ZDNET: “AOL Time Warner may miss the chance to bundle its online service software with Windows
XP, according to sources close to negotiations between the media giant and Microsoft.

Each company has different reasons for wanting to see the AOL software ship with Windows XP,
as it did with earlier versions of the operating system. But one source close to the negotiations
described the positions as “far apart” and warned that “time is running out.”

ZDNET: “With the first bits of Bluetooth hardware trickling to market, proponents of the much-heralded
short-range wireless protocol are turning their attention to software developers for much-needed
application support.

But while Bluetooth supporters maintain wooing the developers is vital to the technology’s
success, some in the development community say they’ve wearied of waiting for the technology
and are concentrating on other wireless protocols.”

The Register: “Richard Stallman’s singular crusade to have Linux christened GNU/Linux got praise
from an unexpected quarter yesterday.

Sun Microsystem’s chief scientist and co-founder John Gage credited RMS with
creating the free software that made the Linux phenomenon possible, describing it
as a fifteen-year sleeper hit.”

NandoTimes: “When someone broke into Slip.net’s computer system, altered customer
accounts and deleted crucial databases, the Internet service provider didn’t have to look far to find the attacker.

It wasn’t a criminal outfit seeking credit card numbers, and it wasn’t a scrawny whiz kid hacking away for a challenge in his dark
bedroom.

It was Nicholas Middleton, a former computer administrator for Slip.net, who had been unhappy at the San Francisco company and
recently quit. Middleton fought the resulting criminal charges on a legal technicality but lost and got three years’ probation.”

CNET: “Net surfers spend about 60 percent of their time online using products and services owned
by just 14 companies, down from 110 companies merely two years ago, according to a
report released Monday.

As further evidence of the rapid consolidation in the Net sector, the report by Jupiter Media
Metrix also found that 50 percent of Internet usage is spent on sites and services owned by just
four companies: AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo and Napster.”

AustralianIT: “Four electronics giants have agreed to jointly
develop corporate backbone systems based on the
freely distributed Linux operating system.

Fujitsu, IBM, Hitachi and NEC agreed on the joint
project and want to market the new system by 2003,
Fujitsu spokesman Minoru Sekiguchi said.”

ZDNET: “Hotmail and Yahoo have left open a security hole that could be exploited to create a
self-mailing worm that, while not damaging, could clog Internet mail servers, a security
expert said this week.”

AsiaBizTech: “First International Computer Inc. (FIC) is exhibiting its first personal
digital assistant (PDA) device, called “1st PDA,” which uses Linux operating system (OS) and is
equipped with a Java virtual machine.”