The Economist wonders whether Microsoft is playing nicer after its antitrust lawsuit. “To the casual observer, Microsoft seems to have changed its
ways. Closer inspection shows that it remains a heavy-handed
monopolist.”

From LWN.net: The nedit (Nirvana editor) package as shipped in the non-free section
accompanying Debian GNU/Linux 2.2/potato had a bug in its printing code:
when printing text it would create a temporary file with the to be
printed text and pass that on to the print system. The temporary file
was not created safely, which could be exploited by an attacked to make
nedit overwrite arbitrary files.

Wired.com comments on the recent flap over the music industry threatening a Princeton team into scrapping its presentation on cracking the Secure Digital Music Inititative. “Once again, the law intended to promote the distribution of content on the Internet has instead been used to restrict it.

That was the result when the recording industry used the digital copyright law to shelve a research project that involved
hacking a watermarking technology promoted by the five major record labels.”

From CNet: “Microsoft founder Bill Gates praising a version of Linux. Linux creator
Linus Torvalds panning it. Have both of them gone mad?

Probably not.

Instead, in what appeared to be a humorous case of identity theft, reviews bearing the tech titans’
names were posted on Amazon.com’s United Kingdom e-tail site. As of Friday morning PDT, the
reviews appeared to have been taken down.”

The Associated Press reports that a California digital rights management
company filed a lawsuit Thursday against Microsoft Corp., claiming patent infringement. “InterTrust Technologies Corp., a Santa Clara-based provider of software and services to help businesses protect their
content over the Internet, filed the suit in federal court in San Jose. The five-page lawsuit alleges that Microsoft’s digital
rights management software being distributed to the public through its Windows Media Player program violates a patent that
was issued to InterTrust on Feb. 6.”

From news.gnome.org: The second stable version of GLAME (GNU/Linux Audio Mechanics) has finally arrived.

Changes since the beta are of course lots of bugfixes and most notably a lot of cosmetic fixes and additions to the graphical user interface (such as adding “native” support for playback and recording). Also context sensitive on-line help was added which uses gnome-help and the installed texinfo documentation.

You can download GLAME from the following locations: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/glame/glame-0.4.0.tar.gz
ftp://glame.sourceforge.net/pub/glame/glame-0.4.0.tar.gz
http://www.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de/~rguenth/glame-0.4.0.tar.gz
Or visit the GLAME homepage at http://www.glame.de/.

SignalGround.com has a story on how to build a cheap Linux box running SuSE 7.1 for less $500. “If you’re living on a budget — and who among us isn’t? — you can still build yourself a
powerful system for a very modest price. On top of that, you can’t go wrong with SuSE
7.1.”

– by Tina Gasperson –

SurePlayer.org has released a GPLed MPG-1 encoder that makes it possible for end users to play videos in their browser, and could make software products like Real Player or Quicktime obsolete.
The code necessary to create these “progressive streaming” files is located at www.sureplayer.org. But if all you want to do is watch videos online, there’s no need to bother with the source code or even the compiled Java applet. All you have to do is click and watch.

SurePlayer.org spokesman Mark Anderson says that streaming video with no player required is a new concept. Real and Quicktime have fooled computer users into believing that they have to have this proprietary software in order to view MPGs. But the http protocol is capable of progressive streaming, and that is the way SurePlayer works within browsers and email programs to deliver streaming video and audio.

Anderson likens the situation to network television, with Real, Quicktime, and Media Player being the ABC, NBC, and CBS of the media player world. “We’re an independent station,” and that freedom makes it possible for those who want to stream video to an Internet audience to do so very inexpensively. Fees can be high for a server license from Real, says Anderson, Indeed, a price check on at the
RealNetworks site shows a Streaming Media Starter Kit listed at $2,999.

Because no one company has control of SurePlayer, and the license is free, it greatly widens the window of opportunity for would-be Internet broadcasters. In fact, it makes SurePlayer more like public access television, to extend Anderson’s analogy, in that anyone who has the desire to create streaming video and display it now has the ability to do so for free.
In fact, the site has posted a short tutorial with links to additional information, to get video-streaming wannabes started in their quests.

The SurePlayer project is sponsored by BYOBroadcast, an “application service provider” marketing a variety of products that audio-enable websites through technology similar to SurePlayer.

Anderson says that they have the SurePlayer MPG technology working in about 90% of browsers, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Windows and Macintosh — and if SurePlayer technology becomes widely used, that could put some pressure on Real and Windows Media. “We’re shooting for at least 96% of the browser matrix,” he says. The SurePlayer has its roots in Europe. “A German doctor [Dr. Jorg Anders] wrote this open source video player, and a German author [Tobias Bading] wrote a [GPL’ed] audio player. We married the two” to come up with SurePlayer.

Up until this release, the project has had only three coders working on it. Anderson says that SurePlayer hopes more developers will come on board to help the core team work out bugs and push for improvements. For instance, the streaming video works on Netscape 4.7x for Linux, but the audio does not, because 4.7x versions don’t support Sun’s AudioPlayer interface.

Java is required for SurePlayer to work. NewsForge also tested the SurePlayer demos on Konqueror 1.9.8 and Opera 5.0b8 in Linux, and Explorer and Netscape on a Mac, with less than satisfactory results. Linux users should download and install Netscape 6 in order to stream MPGs delivered via SurePlayer.

There’s a display of all known bugs at http://www.sureplayer.org/matrix.html. Bug reports should be sent to help@sureplayer.org. Code poets who want to get involved with this project should send email to webmaster@sureplayer.org.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

From a column at LinuxPlanet: “In the process of linking to a story in SFGate about Eazel’s financial problems, a Slashdot editor suggested the
company might want to open a PayPal account to take donations (or contributions, or whatever it would be legal for
a private company to accept) to prolong its life … In short order, Eazel co-founder Bart Decrem did just that, saying ‘we have set up a Paypal account. If you’re a
happy user of Nautilus or Eazel’s services, or just want to make a contribution to support us, please send payments to
paypal@eazel.com.’ On the Nautilus mailing list, Darin Adler confirmed the authenticity of the account, sparking a
brief discussion of how the money would be handled.”

Reuters has a story saying a group of Microsoft competitors is suggesting that Microsoft tying its media player software to its XP operating system is another antitrust violation.