Anonymous Reader writes, “The record companies are buying Net music companies because they want to profit from Net music, there is nothing wrong with that. Just buying Net music sites is not enough though, they want to dominate it by combining these sites and their audience into two uber-sites namely MusicNet and Duet. The problem is they are already charging too much, increasing by more than double the $8.99 standard cost for an MP3 album set by the recently purchased EMusic.com. That is a sign of an oligopoly’s influence. An oligopoly can do that by eliminating choice, which is what these acquisitions accomplish.” The story’s at mp3newswire.net.

ZDNet has the commentary: “Although Linux has grown by leaps and bounds during the last few years, it is still plagued with
a lot of issues that will keep it away from being a 100 percent viable alternative to Windows for a
long time. At the top of the list comes the simple fact that Linux, by design, is not a common
person’s operating system. Linux, like Unix, was designed with networking in mind and network
security.”

From The Register: “According to top security expert Steve Gibson, Windows XP threatens to make the
Internet unstable as it will allow large numbers of people to launch uncontrollable
denial-of-service attacks to whichever IP address they see fit.

Mr. Gibson came across the flaw while doing an in-depth investigation into DoS
attacks on his own site, grc.com.”

Matthew Rothenberg writes, “Courtesy of eWeek: Apple Computer Inc.’s switch to Mac OS X has opened up the playing field to new contenders such as Norway’s Opera Software and Omni Group.”

Posted at LWN.net: Mario Lorenz discovered a possible buffer overflow in the kerberos
gssapi-aware ftpd in the krb5-workstation package that is included
in all versions of Immunix OS. It is believed at this time that
StackGuard prevents the exploitation of this vulnerability; however,
in the absence of an exploit to test against, we recommend that all
users of the kerberos packages update their installation.

Patrick Mullen writes, “The Duke of URL has just posted its review of NetBSD 1.5. The review covers everything from installation, to its features, as well as how it ranks up in security and against the other *BSDs.”

CNet has the story. OpenBSD’s leader Theo de Raadt has removed IPFilter from OpenBSD because IPFilter author Darren Reed has modified the license, which now explicitly forbids people from changing the software without Reed’s permission.

fred77 writes, “From The New Scientist.
A new European Parliament working document confirms the existence of Echelon, a secretive US-led communications surveillance network.
The document recommends that all European citizens should encrypt their email and steer clear of closed software. It recommends using open source software that can be checked for hidden backdoors.”
Full story at newscientist.com.

The Register: “Supplementary briefs have been submitted by both contestants in the appeal of
2600 publisher Eric Corely aka Emmanuel Goldstein, who was barred from posting
or linking to the DeCSS descrambling utility last summer by US District Judge Lewis
Kaplan.”

LinuxSecurity: “Malicious parties may be able to prevent a NetBSD node from
communicating with other nodes by transmitting a lot of bogus
fragmented IPv4 packets.”