Wall Street Journal (via ZDNet): “The Gnutella file-sharing system is growing faster than was believed technically
possible, thanks to work by programmers, suggesting the software may become a
permanent part of the Internet landscape as well as a continuing headache for
copyright holders.”

The Register reports: “Sun Microsystems has told it employees NOT to use the Internet in an effort to
shave a few dollars off its phone bill and thereby make its annual results look a bit
better.”

Rorsharch writes “The Register today reported on ‘Microsoft’s ‘help’ in turning “Britain’s e-government vision into a reality” has mysteriously turned into a lockout for users of anything other than IE on Windows. Linux, Netscape and Mac (even with IE, friends…) can look but not touch, because the digital certificate system selected by the developers mysteriously always seems to lead to IE 5.01 or above on Windows.’ Opera Software will be taking this up with the UK’s e-envoy. Readers can register their displeasure at info@new.labour.org.uk“

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – May 29, 2001 – Lutris Technologies Inc., a leading provider of application server technology for wired and wireless development and deployment, today announced that NEC Soft, Ltd., has begun selling the Lutris Enhydra 3.5J application server, completing a joint effort with Lutris to fully translate and localize Lutris Enhydra documentation and user interfaces to the Japanese language. Delivery of Lutris Enhydra 3.5J represents the full establishment of NEC Soft as Lutris’ first major distributor of Lutris products and services outside the United States.”NEC Soft truly believes that Lutris Enhydra meets the needs of a large, unaddressed audience that cannot afford a traditional application development solution,” said NEC Soft President Takaaki Seki. “As the steward of Enhydra, Lutris Technologies is the obvious partner for ensuring the smooth and highly successful joint venture to address our server-side business goals.”

The two companies are working together to train NEC Soft staff on the Lutris platform in order to deliver fully localized support and training. To further the open source process that has contributed to Lutris Enhydra’s robustness and cutting-edge capabilities in wireless development, Lutris is in the process of exporting a Japanese-specific version of Enhydra.org. This site will encourage Japanese developers to take advantage of and contribute to the open source community process.

“The Enhydra project is a worldwide phenomenon, serving the needs of developers in virtually every country in the world,” said Yancy Lind, president and CEO of Lutris Technologies. “Working with our first major Japanese partner, NEC Soft, is part of our strategy to ensure our partners and the worldwide business community have complete access to the services and support for Enhydra defined by Lutris.”

Lutris Enhydra 3.5 is an easy to use, low cost, volume platform for delivering applications to today’s modern mobile devices including WAP, i-mode, and J2ME phones, PDAs and standard Web browsers. Enhydra also uniquely supports Macromedia Flash technology by integrating Flash with XML data streams.

This announcement comes on the heels of Lutris and Hewlett-Packard’s announced sales and marketing agreement to sell Lutris Enhydra 3.5 into the HP Netserver channel.

About NEC Soft, Ltd.
Based on the sophisticated technological capabilities it has cultivated until now, makes full use of its system integration know-how to offer advanced optimum solutions developed with a global perspective. Backed by the comprehensive capabilities of the NEC Group, NEC Soft creates total solutions and offers a broad array of services ranging from consulting to system integration, software development, training, and management. For further information, please visit NEC Soft home page at: http://www.necsoft.co.jp.

About Lutris Technologies
Lutris Technologies, a leading provider of application server technology for wired and wireless development and deployment, is the original developer and primary sponsor of Enhydra, a leading open source Internet application server supporting Java, XML, and wireless technologies. Lutris offers a full range of support services and technical training to Lutris Enhydra customers and provides complete Internet consulting services, including strategy and development services, to the Enhydra community and to Internet-savvy businesses. Clients range from entrepreneurs and companies launching new Web ventures to Fortune 500 IT organizations growing their business with an online presence. Additional information about Lutris products and services is available at www.lutris.com, or call (877) 688-3724, (831) 460-7590 or +44 1923 431669 in the United Kingdom.

# # #

The latest edition of Dr. Dobb’s TCL-URL is now available at Linux Weekly News. In this edition: “Richard Suchenwirth demonstrates complex arithmetic in Tcl” … “Jean-Claude Wippler announces TclKit 8.4.22” … “Eric Leunissen posts a hilarious bug caused by a cut-and-paste error in a Tcl script.”

– By Grant Gross –

The team working on GNU.FREE, a project to give nations a Free Software option of conducting elections using the Internet, has released an improved version of the software, version 1.6.

Just as several countries are expressing interest in using GNU.FREE, according to the project leader, the new version of GNU.FREE boasts several new features, including “out-of-the-box” support for PostgeSQL and MySQL, the ability for users to create test ballots, and an updated testing suite. Main download sites are at http://www.free-project.org/download/ and ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/free/.

“The system is beginning to mature,” says Jason Kitcat, project leader and an Internet consultant in the United Kingdom. “So instead of adding features to make sure the system actually works we’re looking at how to make the administrator’s job easier, improving usability and so on.”

The first release of GNU.FREE was in March 2000, and since then organizations or government officials from several countries, including Canada, Mexico, Sweden, and the Philippines, have shown interest in the project, Kitcat says. In the United States, a couple of groups, including OpenElection.org, are advocating the use of the GNU.FREE software.

GNU.FREE is, in the words of Kitcat, “a Java-based voting system which is secure, private and very scalable.” How it works: A voter logs in and is authorized by the Electoral Roll server. After the voter casts the ballot, the vote is
sent to the Regional Server. “The vote is sent without any identifying information, just a single use encrypted key from the Electoral Roll server to prove to the Regional server that you are a valid voter,” Kitcat says. “It’s highly scalable because you could have infinite pairs of Regional and ER servers, and then at the end of the vote the results get pushed up to a Totaller server or servers.”

Kitcat’s project is separate from the eVote project that’s been hosted by FreeDevelopers.net, although Kitcat has communicated with that project’s leaders through the FD-Democracy email list. Traffic on the FreeDevelopers.net list has been quiet this spring after a dispute over when to release the eVote code under the GPL. (Update: FreeDevelopers.net is now supporting the GNU.FREE project instead of the eVote project, and people from the mailing list have worked on GNU.FREE.)

Organizations such as the Voting Integrity Project question whether Internet voting will be safe enough to trust national elections with. The group also suggests that Internet voting will give an unfair advantage to voters who have computers.

But Kitcat argues that a multiple security feature approach can provide a secure environment for elections, and the open code means more people can find and fix errors.

“You have to realise that in any organisation or process complete security is an unattainable state of perfection,” he writes in an email. “Safes are rated for how long they will last with certain tools (e.g. 20 minutes for an attacker with an acetylene torch) and that kind of culture needs to appear in the computing world, where currently people say a computer is secure or it isn’t — a ridiculously binary and simplistic way of
working!”

He adds: “As far as crackers go, we have a whole raft of audit trails, intrusion detection systems and tamper checks. During an election we have 24/7 monitoring so that not only can we track attempts, but we can catch and prosecute the perpetrators. This is the same as for current elections, it’s illegal to defraud a ballot and there are processes in place for catching the offenders.”

The GNU.FREE team of about 15 developers is next working on improving the GUI, dealing with multiple voting systems, and creating a program to manage the polling
officials’ tasks, Kitcat says. “That last point is particularly important; we need
to build a program so that we can manage the process of voting in a mixed media ballot,” he says. “It’s likely that many votes will have polling station, postal and Internet aspects so we need to empower the administrators to manage how [people] can vote, how and when. I see this as key to improving the adoption of our software.”

For more about the project and the philosophy behind it, check out GNU.FREE’s FAQ and the Free-Project.org writing section.

After a disastrous showing at technology trade shows early this year, Bluetooth seemed to be the protocol that everyone would rather forget about. A faint pulse registered last week with IBM’s UltraPort Module, a Bluetooth clip-on device for its ThinkPad laptops. The pulse grew stronger this week as 3Com announced its new Bluetooth PC cards and “personal networking environment” software. If HP and Compaq release their Bluetooth-enabled systems later this summer, as planned, Bluetooth just might make it out of the vaporware gutter. Full story at PC World.

The latest GNOME Summary is now available at Linux Weekly News. Stories in this edition include Sun’s first official version of Solaris GNOME, Ximian’s release of Soup (an implementation of of SOAP in C, and a new development roadmap for the upcoming 0.2.0 release of GStreamer.

IBM last week unveiled new technology that ameks 400GB consumer hard drives and 6GB CompactFlash cards a reality. Competitors fired back at IBM, saying Big Blue’s technology — which it calls Pixie Dust — is overhyped and offers more capacity than needed. “I can’t imagine needing more than 20, 30, 40 gigs — that’s a lot of stuff,” said a digital mapmaker. Full story from ZDNet eWEEK.

“Platform Computing Inc., a global leader in
Distributed Resource Management (DRM) solutions, announced that its LSF (Load
Sharing Facility) software is poised to help accelerate the introduction of
Itanium-based systems into existing compute environments. Platform’s LSF is
ready to ship and will support the commercial availability of the 64-bit Intel
Itanium processor architecture for systems running either the Linux operating
system or Hewlett Packard Inc.’s HP-UX.” Full press release at Canada NewsWire.