The Register: “The quite reliable hacker tracker attrition.org is reporting that nearly nine thousand
machines had been auto-defaced by the sadmind/IIS worm as of Tuesday, making
it one of the most effective little scripts ever loosed on the Net.”

Wired: “The Aimster file-trading network has a new security nemesis, but the methods being used to track files might run the copyright-protection company into legal
troubles.

On Thursday, Mediaforce launched a business-to-business tracking service that scans the Aimster file-trading network for copyright violations. For up to $50
per title per month, the automated Mediaforce application will scan the private network for selected titles across the Gnutella, Napster, iMesh and now,
Aimster networks.”

Microsoft Security: “The patches discussed below address two security vulnerabilities that are unrelated to each other except in the sense that
both affect Index Server 2.0.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, advisories were released for minicom, cron, zope, man-db, gftp, samba, pine, glibc, nedit, sgmltool, netscape, xntp3,
vixie-cron, analog, dialog, cvsweb, dhcp, squid, ncurses, and ed. The vendors include Caldera, Conectiva, Debian, EnGarde,
Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, and TurboLinux. It was a busy week for most vendors, especially Turbo Linux. If you are using
any of these distributions, we highly recommend you update all vulnerable packages.”

Kelly McNeill writes “As a contract consultant, I’m often asked to create new services to deploy over the Internet, and in many cases these services require some sort of end-user component. Whether the goal is browsing stock quotes or for the latest peer-to-peer gizmo, almost universally we’re asked to create a version that only serves the Windows community.
…
Why Windows? The reason most cited is market share, with some strangely accurate figure that “93 percent of the Internet population runs Windows.” While that 2-digit figure seems way too accurate for statistical credibility, I’m also wondering if it isn’t based in innumeracy.”

PC World reports that MP3.com is launching “netCD”s, which will allow customers to purchase CDs on line and keep them at MP3.com in a “music locker,” from which they’ll be able to download mp3s to burn to real CDs, local drives, or mp3 players.

ZDNet reports that a European Parliament investigating committee looking into Echelon, an alleged English-speaking country spy-satellite network, was refused a meeting with US White House officials, and ended their fact-finding mission to Washington abruptly.

eWeek reports that Red Hat will be dropping Netscape from its distribution package just as soon as Mozilla 1.0 is released.

Kelly McNeill writes “Nobody has to pay a fee to God to understand science, to engage in technology, or to participate in acts of discovery or invention. There is no license agreement for natural law, and there is no great cosmic penalty for teaching the laws of nature to others. …

Nature is actually undocumented open-source, which is where the intrigues begin. As it is largely undocumented, the scientist’s job is to provide mankind with useful documentation. The engineer’s job is to take that documentation and use it to build new “applications” (products) on top of the “code base” (natural law) that pre-exists. And the educator’s job is to provide open access to the documentation of both natural and man-made information.”

O’Reilly reports on the compatibility between Linux and BSD on the Power PC platform. The report “is intended to document various parts of the emulation subsystem, and to highlight some architecture-dependant issues that can arise in argument passing, signal handling, and with the way some system calls work.”