Yahoo! reports that Cisco is releasing a device to allow a regular telephone to be plugged in to a broadband connection for phone-over-IP.

Kelly McNeill writes “”Microsoft does not have to change the product to increase the flow of revenue. As a monopolist, they can change the price at will. As a monopolist of a product that is *licensed* instead of *sold,* it can also change the price *retroactively.* This means that a company may “buy” a set of Microsoft products, but its term of usage is artificially limited by the terms of the Microsoft contract. Since the “purchase” will be of limited duration, Microsoft can demand that the company do one of the following:“

ZDNet reports on Intel’s latest efforts to beat out the new competition: Transmeta’s Crusoe processor. Intel is selling new very low voltage processors to take on Crusoe in its niche.

Debian Planet reports on the possibility of Red Hat’s RPM and Debian’s DEB package format merging within two years.

Jeff Gerhardt writes, “The Linux Show hosts unique field trial of Cylant Linux based security software. Break a web server for fun and profit.

Monday May 21st, 2001
Aurora, IL (the home of Wayne’s World) — Jeff Gerhardt, Co-host of The Linux Show announced today a unique test being co-sponsored by TLS. “On Tuesday night’s show,” stated Gerhardt, “we will be having as our guest on one of the segments of show; John C. Munson, PhD and CEO of Cylant Technology, Inc. of Bend, Oregon. It is our hope to help them demonstrate the effectiveness of their technology by offering a TLS HACK & CRACK CHALLENGE to all member of the IT community. This is an opportunity for you would-be security experts out there on the internet to show us your stuff. Cylant has placed a challenge server (http://victim.cylant.com) at our disposal on the Internet running a very vulnerable (un-patched) version of RedHat 6.2. In spite of the fragile nature of this system, Cylant claims they are able to protect it from the most vigorous of attacks.”

John C. Munson of Cylant stated, “The problem that we have in communicating with folks in the security community is that we do something very different from anything that they have seen before. We have developed a measurement based engineering solution to software misuse. It is our position that if a
piece software is suitably instrumented and you monitor its activity while it is running, you can identify when the software is doing something different. It is a very simple principle and it works well.”

“The TLS Hack Challenge starts at 6:00pm ct on Tuesday Night,” continued Gerhardt, “that will give people a full 2 hours to try to break the server before show time starts. The prizes we are giving for breaking the server are pretty cool. There is only going to be one winne, with that winner taking all the prizes. The prizes include one of those very cool inflatable penguin chairs furnished by The Linux Journal, a 4 pack of Guinness (in cans), the actual “victim.cylant.com” machine, a very cool certificate stating you are the person who hacked the server, and the winner will get to be a guest on the following weeks show and get the opportunity to brag about their prowess as a system cracker.

The rules are simple. The FIRST person who breaks or hacks the server, emails the Linux show and shows us proof of the hack wins the contest.”

About GeekCast.Com Network and The Linux Show!!
GeekCast.Com Network is the new home network of The Linux Show!!. Information about the network can be found at www.geekcast.com.

The Linux Show!! is GeekCast’s “flagship” show, and is the No. 1 and longest running Linux focused webcast in the United States, and quite probably the world.

A columnist at ZDNet comments that the flame war between Microsoft and the Open Source community is starting to get a bit tiring. The latest person commenting on Microsoft v.p. Craig Mundie’s May 3 speech: Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann.

Rauch Medien (rauchmedien.com)
has decided to base RAID Alert, their upcoming remote RAID monitoring system,
on Arco RAID technology (arcoide.com).
The RAID Alert system is a combination of hardware and software that continuously
monitors your RAID system and, in the event of a problem, alerts you with important
information via email or email-enabled device like pager or cell phone.

“We believe RAID Alert will prove to be a very valuable tool to the IT community,”
said Robert Lodato, Marketing Director for Rauch Medien. “It will enable system
administrators to know precisely which drive failed on which server, as soon
as it happens.”

How it works
The RAID Alert system continuously monitors your RAID array and alerts you when
any problem has been detected. The RAID Alert system can be configured to respond
with detailed technical information on your system. This includes system status,
identification information (IP Address, Host Name, and Alert Alias), error information,
hardware configuration information (Such as hard drive specs), and RAID status
code. The alert can then be received via email or email-enabled device like
pager or cellular phone.

The RAID Alert system is perfect for call centers, data centers, and corporate
networks where large IT managerial tasks exist. The RAID Alert system streamlines
these tasks by automating the monitoring of your network’s storage and keeping
your IT staff informed on current network events. This addition to Rauch Medien’s
email alert system that comes standard on all servers, provides peace of mind
not available with any other server on the market.

Proven Technology
Rauch Medien has based RAID Alert on Arco’s proven RAID technology. “Arco’s
RAID technology is a very mature product that has proven its reliability in
the field, which is what counts,” said Cory R. Rauch, Director of Technology
for Rauch Medien. “This, coupled with excellent technical support, is why we
chose to go with Arco.”

“Arco is pleased that our DupliDisk II technology has been selected by Rauch
Medien,” said Joel Rieger, Marketing Manager for Arco Computer Products, Inc.
“DupliDisk II technology remains the proven solution leader for IDE RAID in
the Linux marketplace.”

Availability
The RAID Alert system will be available by month’s end Rauch Medien’s web-site
rauchmedien.com and will be available to be configured with any Rauch Medien
server system. To learn more about what RAID Alert can do for you please visit
www.rauchmedien.com/raidalert/
or call toll-free 1-877-324-0887.

About Rauch Medien
Rauch Medien, headquartered in New York, USA, develops, manufactures, and markets
Linux and Open Source based hardware and software. Rauch Medien also maintains
the operating system and computer tech site OSFAQ (osfaq.com).
Since conception, Rauch Medien has focused on providing Linux and Open Source
based solutions for real world applications. Their comprehensive product line
includes workstations, servers, clusters, and storage. More information is available
at www.rauchmedien.com.

News Release
For Immediate Release
For More Info Contact
Robert Lodato
Sales & Marketing
Rauch Medien
sales@rauchmedien.com

From the fine folks at O’Reilly: “Our Linux expert Chris Halsall says for those who need only a simple
PDA to handle this week’s appointments, the Agenda is not quite ready
for prime time. But for geeks and developers, the Agenda VR3, which
runs X Windows and lets you run terminal sessions, is well worth
considering. Halsall’s full review is now available on O’Reilly
Network’s Linux DevCenter, and I thought you would be interested.” The story’s at Oreillynet.com.

– by Robin “Roblimo” Miller

It’s starting to sound more like a management bloodbath, or as a PR person would probably say, “a major upper-level staff realignment.” But whatever words you use, Mandrake seems to have had a sudden change of heart … err … management. We are not exactly sure who is now in charge of the popular Mandrake Linux distribution, but hope to find out soon. One positive note: The original rumors we heard about Mandrake laying off “all the desktop developers” are apparently untrue.
The first inkling we got that all was not right in Mandrake-land came in the form of an email from a freelance journalist of our acquaintance who forwarded a rumor purportedly from “French sites” about Mandrake canning its entire desktop development team. NewsForge night editor David Graham, who is fluent in French (at least of the Canadian variety), cruised all the French-language sites he could think of that might carry news of such an event, but saw nothing verifiable.

Meanwhile, NewsForge editor Dan Berkes got Mandrake’s California office to admit that MandrakeSoft CEO Henri Poole has departed. Further research put us in contact with several MandrakeSoft insiders who say this is what has gone down so far:

• The president, CIO, and “other executives” have been fired “as a group.”
• CTO Jean-Loup Gailly is out.
• All the IS team except one is bye-bye.
• Some engineers and other “random troops” have either been laid off, taken “voluntary” pay cuts, or have gone from full-time to part-time status.

But the team responsible for developing Mandrake for the desktop, contrary to the rumors, is supposedly going to remain (mostly) intact for the moment. As one Mandrake insider put it, the desktop developers “are still the people who make the product Macmillan [Mandrake’s shrink-wrap product distributor] sells that generates income.”

Company insiders note that most of the Mandrake managers who were shown the door today are American. One source suggested that this was because “Mandrake can’t rationally hope for a U.S. IPO any time soon, so there was no reason to keep a lot of high-cost American managers around. The company is now more French than it has been for the last few years.”

Sales and marketing staff were supposedly affected least by the cuts.

Maybe this is an unhealthy display of bias, but in the spirit of full disclosure we must admit that a majority of NewsForge editors use and like the Mandrake GNU/Linux distribution. We are seriously rooting for Mandrake. We want them to keep improving their fine software, and hope they will keep us up to date on any more changes in the company.

We also wish they’d finally ship the Mandrake 8.0 boxed sets they claimed were in stores on May 16, but weren’t.

Maybe, under their new CEO, the Mandrake 8.0 “powerpack” version will finally hit the shelves. We’re certainly willing to go out and buy a few copies for our own use, and if these numbers can be believed, more than one third of all retail Linux distro buyers are waiting for the next big-time version of Mandrake with breaths as bated as ours.

We’ll have follow-ups to this story as they come in. Don’t go away!

eWeek has a story about Linux’s future on the desktop and on the server, where the forecast is sunnier.