ZDNet reports on efforts to fight the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which “forces schools and libraries that
receive government money to block Web images deemed harmful to minors.” Opponents of the act say it blocks out protected free speech, while giving a false hope that it’s keeping out porn.

Joshua Marshall writes: “There are a few new articles on Devshed.com that may be of interest:” Read on…
One is called “The JSP Files Part 7: Bugs, Beans and Banks.” This article covers JSP Exceptions for error reporting and recovery, and how to integrate JavaBeans into JSP scripts.

The other article is called “Democracy, The PHP Way.” This article is a tutorial on how to use PHP to create an online poll. It also covers some image manipulation and cookie functions in PHP.”

An anonymous reader tipped us off to this “ZDNET story: “eWEEK Labs found that KDE (K Desktop Environment) comes much
closer to delivering the sort of smooth interface that users have come
to expect from the Macintosh and Windows operating systems than
does GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment). In tests,
KDE delivered snappier and more polished performance than did
GNOME on the same hardware.”

ZDNET.co.uk: “IBM on Wednesday gave Wall Street some desperately needed good
news, meeting first-quarter expectations.

The company earned $1.75bn, or 98 cents a share, compared with
$1.52bn and 83 cents per share in the same period a year earlier. A
consensus of analysts polled by First Call had expected earnings of 98
cents a share. IBM sales grew 15 percent year over year.”

“An application called SMBRelay, written by cDc’s Sir Dystic, exploits a design flaw
in the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol on Win NT/2K boxes, easily enabling
an attacker to interpose himself between the client and the server.” More at The Register.

Wired: ”
As China and the United States attempt to peacefully end their diplomatic standoff sparked by the mid-air collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese
fighter jet, crackers from both countries continue to wage private wars on the Internet.”

Mirko Zorz writes: “Aleksandar Stancin writes: “To keep it short and simple, here are some good pointers to enhancing your system’s security. But remember, there’s no absolute security, so keep your eyes open, subscribe yourself to good sec-related mailing lists, and keep your software up-to-date.” The entire article is here at netsecurity.org.”

Frank Carlos writes: “This article at alphaworks.ibm.com compares how the IBM Web Services Development Environment and Toolkit Compares with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Alhough Windows developers will feel comfortable with the new and improved Visual Studio .NET, IBM tools are currently far ahead in terms of implementation of proposed standards, which makes them a first choice if you want to learn Web Services coding techniques and experiment with the new proposed standards for Web Services.”

– by Robin “roblimo” Miller –
This was written at 8:06 a.m. US EDT, at which time there was still no official announcement. But we spotted Mandrake 8.0 ISOs on a number of Mandrake mirrors and noticed that the images were spreading rapidly. Mandrake 8.0 includes kernel 2.4.3, KDE 2.1.1, Xfree 4.0.3, GNOME 1.4,
Nautilus 1.0, RPM 4.0, an improved GUI installer, a number of bugfixes, and updates to many external software packages included in the standard Mandrake package. We’ve provided a selection of mirrors we were able to reach to verify that they contained the latest 8.0 ISOs. (We tried others, but many were already saturated, so it looks like word is out already. We’re updating mirrors as notes come in, at least until the official announcement comes out.)

List of Mandrake mirrors here.

Several mirrors we have spotted that have 8.0 downloadable now:

ftp.fh-giessen.de/

ftp.nl.uu.net

ftp.stealth.net/

gd.tuwien.ac.at/

ftp.claranet.fr/

ftp.du.se/

ftp.linux.cz/

Note: Files labeled “Traktopel” are 8.0 beta, not the finished version.

More 8.0 mirrors are sure to come online as the day goes on, and, as always, keep checking Mandrake’s official site for information and updates. But be warned: When we last tried it, at about 8 a.m. US EDT, it was already saturated almost to the point of uselessness.

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

ZDNET: “True: New Internet Computer Co. has set its sights on
schools, corporations, small businesses, and households
with its upgraded New Internet Computer (NIC),
Version 2.0 ($200 street), a PC-like appliance for
Internet e-mail and browsing. Odd but true: The NIC
stores its Linux OS and Netscape Navigator browser on a
CD.”