Wired: “A new tracking technology called Songbird claims it allows copyright holders to catch file traders on the Napster and Gnutella systems. But early results haven’t been good — and some even question the viability of the service.”

ZDNET: “We’ve seen programming
languages develop
increasingly greater
distance from the
hardware they’re meant to
control. C provided a level
of abstraction above
assembly language, and
C++ bolted numerous
extensions onto C,
creating what many
consider an unwieldy
monster. Having been
witness to quite a few
mind-curdling discussions
during the past few years
about what a given
snippet of C++ really
means, C++ evokes in me
parallels to esoteric
numerological
interpretation. Clearly, this
is not Programming for the
Rest of Us.”

Avatar writes: “While the number of GeForce3 reviews increases daily, not one has taken a look at what the card can do under Linux. Until now that is. Evil3D has a Linux performance sneak peek posted to our main page at http://www.evil3d.net.”

ZDNET: “And the world’s biggest Linux company is…Caldera Systems. While
Red Hat would disagree and you could argue for IBM, with its broad
Linux support, Caldera has its own case. Caldera’s purchase of the
Santa Cruz Operation’s (SCO) Server Software and Professional
Services Divisions gives it a combined Unix/Linux and reseller
presence far greater than its pure Linux play competitors.

Some think, however, that Caldera, now Caldera International, is no
longer a Linux company as such. Al Gillen, International Data Corp’s
research manager for systems software says, “They can call
themselves anything they want, but I don’t know if they’re really a
Linux company. I think of them now as a platform company like IBM
or HP.” Still Ransom Love, Caldera’s CEO says that Caldera’s goal,
“…is to make Linux on industry standard hardware the alternative
business platform.”

CNET: ”
The Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, which generated about $3 billion in revenue from
server software in the past five years, is trying to compete in a market dominated by
companies such as Oracle and Sun Microsystems.”

BBC: “Computer hackers in China have called a halt to their online war
with internet users from the United States.

The so-called Honker Union of China – an informal union of
Chinese hackers – says it has successfully attacked more than a
thousand United States websites.”

MSNBC: “Mix a rabid love of freedom with an
intense dislike of corporate or state-sponsored censorship, fold
in the wacky collective brilliance of a group of rogue coders, and
what do you get? Tyranny’s worst nightmare: an untraceable,
globally distributed digital information network called
Peekabooty.”

Wired: “Since Mac’s new operating system has an open-source, Unix-based core, many observers fear the relatively unhacked platform is ripe for attack. Others think that makes it even more secure.”

LinuxGraphic.org: “The problem with the current Gimp codebase is that most parts of it originate back to a time when Gimp was based on Motif and the GTK object system did not exist. Since then only parts of the
core have been rewritten to make use of the benefits the object-oriented approach gives. Also, user interface and core functionality is totally mixed up. When trying to add new features to the
Gimp-1.2 codebase, it is very easy to get lost and very likely that you break things.”

warthawg@blackhat.net writes: “The release of Ximian GNOME 1.4 a couple of weeks ago resulted in a flurry of activity as people downloaded and installed it. Like the KDE project, Ximian GNOME’s success will go a long way toward establishing Linux as a viable desktop OS for an ever-widening circle of users.” More at ITWorld.com.