Network World Fusion reports on a bill before the Arizona state legislature, that would create the first state-level Internet infrastructure security center. Bill proponents say the center is needed because information from national security sources like the FBI and Department of Defense takes too long to filter down to the local level.

“Yes, true believers, Samba doesn’t just serve up Windows. It can be part of your whole network file sharing scheme with or without Windows in the picture. One of the things your Windows friends will point out, however, is the friendliness with which they can mount shares or network drives in their Network
Neighborhood. Never mind that the server they are connecting to is a Linux server running Samba, they still have to rub it in. With that in mind, I
decided to go looking for ways to become part of the neighborhood in a similar, graphical fashion. That’s how I came across LinNeighborhood.” From Linux Journal.

In this week’s installment: project news and updates including the Early Adopter Program, dates of upcoming road shows, and a new wish list. Read the post at Linux Weekly News.

The latest edition of the LDP weekly news is now available. New documents include the MP3 Player Box HOWTO, and Connecting to MS SQL 6.x+ via Openlink/PHP/ODBC mini-HOWTO. Updated documents include the Linux + Windows 95 mini-HOWTO, Firewall Piercing mini-HOWTO, and the XFree86 Font Deuglification HOWTO.

Open Collector interviews the developers behind India’s Simputer, a low-cost computing device powered by Linux and Open Source software.

Linux Journal: “The Ninth Annual International Python Conference was held March 5-8, 2001, at the Long Beach Hilton in Long Beach, California. Over 300 people
attended. This article covers some observations made by a web developer, with a special emphasis on the funny things that were said.”

In a ZDNet column on computing industry holy wars, David Coursey writes: “I am not a Linux or
UNIX person, though I have a few Linux-based
servers sitting around, so maybe I am missing the
point. Still, nobody has ever really explained to me
the value of all these semi-incompatible versions of
essentially the same OS. What value does this
bring to customers? I get how it helps the vendors,
but what about us?”

The Register: “The long-debated question of whether software and network vulnerability
data should be shared freely and immediately re-surfaced recently, as
Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC),
formerly the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), announced
hooking up with a private-industry organization called the Internet
Security Alliance to make its advance alerts and vulnerability database
immediately available to members.”

Say goodbye to RFCs 821 and 822, the documents that defined Internet e-mail for a generation; say hello to RFCs 2821 and 2822. Like their predecessors, the former describes SMTP and the latter outlines the standard network mail message format. The Slashdot item on the new RFCs says “Doesn’t look like the changes were too radical — mostly just catching them up to current practice…”

Slashdot: “Chris Faulhaber, one of the TrustedBSD developers, announced on the trustedbsd-discuss mailing list that Samba’s POSIX.1e ACL support is now working on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT, and even has a screen shot. This has been a high-demand feature, apparently, and could be a big selling point for sites currently running Windows NT as their enterprise operating system.”