IDG: “With the recent spate of viruses, hack attacks, and identity theft, cryptography and security has moved beyond the venue of mathematicians and technologists. But it’s no less complicated.”

An anonymous reader writes: “From ITWorld (fka LinuxWorld): Wallace Stevens was famous for writing poetry which can be difficult to grok. As a poet, he gave us many gems, among them a poem called “The Sense of the Sleight-of-hand Man.” On one level, that poem seems to me to say that if one can imagine something, it can happen. The Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA) says something very similar. UCITA says that if a large software publisher can imagine terms more favorable to itself than to the customer, it can make them real. The poem is art. UCITA is a crime against consumers.”

Wired: “A federal judge says she would allow music publishers to join in a class-action suit against Napster. That means up to 27,000 new plaintiffs could try and get a piece of the file-trading company.”

An anonymous reader writes: “From ITWorld (fka LinuxWorld): “Linus Torvalds said April 8 that reports of him trashing the new Mac OS X are simply misquotes, as he has “never commented on OS X.” The reports (see Resources for links) stem from early looks at his upcoming autobiography, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, which he coauthored with David Diamond.”

MSNBC tells us: “Using a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 3200C scanner may cause a
computer running Windows 95, 98, or Me to stop responding
for a period of 3 to 5 seconds several times every hour, says
Microsoft.”

PCWorld: “In recent months Juno, Adobe,
Verant, and now Microsoft have been among a number of companies that have felt the sting of a backlash
against particularly unreasonable licensing terms for the use of software and web services.”

Anandtech: “The VIA KT266 is here, and it is the third Socket-A DDR Chipset to hit the streets. Is the third time around the DDR block going to be a good experience for the Athlon? Find out if your next motherboard should have a KT266 on it or not.”

Nandotimes: “NakedNews.com, the nude newscast which claims its has nothing
to hide, will flash its first nude male presenter Thursday on its Internet webcast.
Lucas Tyler, a 33-year-old former investment adviser, will join the all-female news team, which strips
bit-by-bit as they read the business, international, entertainment, sports and weather each day, said
spokeswoman Kathy Pinckert.”

DailyRader: “To mourn today’s passing of the Indrema Linux-based console, we thought we’d look back at
some of the old classic systems that died before their time. We know we’ve missed a bunch,
but these are the ones that pulled hardest at our heart strings. Except the Konix, that one’s
just there because it’s obscure.”

MSNBC: “…hardware companies depend on fan sites as an
inexpensive way to generate buzz about their products. The
underground news outlets, for example, helped fuel the hype for
Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 2, which led many U.S. consumers to
camp out at stores in quest of the elusive game machine last
October. “I know I’m being used by [Microsoft],” says Bob
Stein, head of ActiveXbox.com, another fan site. But the
21-year-old Penn State senior adds: “I’m using them, too, to
get free software and hardware to review.”