GonzoJohn tells us about an article at LinuxOrbit.com: “Screen-Grabbers! Catchy name isn’t it?
Both KDE and GNOME are full of helpful small applications for specific tasks. ‘Screen-Grabbers’ are applications that will take a picture of your desktop or a window on your desktop, and save the picture as an image file, like a PNG or JPG.

What can screen-grabbers be useful for? Well, for one thing, they make documenting applications a lot easier. And of course, technical writers like myself find them indispensable. Linux desktop users can also take advantage of these screen-grabbers to capture error messages for hunting down the solution to problems.”

Ismet Kursunoglu tells us about the Linux at LAX meeting coming up April 14 at 10 a.m. in Torrance, Calif. “Christopher Smith gives two presentations, one on hardware and one on
software. For details please see

Linuxatlax.org. On the hardware side he will talk about the various wireless networking solutions currently
available, with an emphasis on 802.11b wireless networking (Wi-Fi). This provides 11 Mbps of
bandwidth in a fairly cost-effective manner.

In his second talk Chris will describe how Linux’s multitasking works. The presentation will
start out slow, defining terms like ‘process,’ ‘threads,’ ‘tasks’ and ‘signals’ in the context of
the Linux world. Depending on time and interest, discussion will move on to the good and the
bad of the Linux approach to these concepts, and strategies programmers can use in the real
world to get the best performance out of available hardware.”

Posted at gnome.org: “On behalf of the services engineering team at Eazel, I’d like to
announce Reef, our next-generation architecture for delivering online
services.

It is based around the concept of Service View Bundles (SVBs),
downloadable self-contained bundles of script code, images, and other
resources (for example html or glade files). The Reef/SVB idea is a
about making it possible to deliver “live content” over the network,
creating a platform for web services that are easier to deploy than
compiled native code, but richer than HTML.”

The Register follows up on reports of the Adore worm. “The worm replaces an Internet service, known as ICMP (Internet Control Message
Protocol), with a version containing a back door feature that allows a hacker
access to systems whenever a properly formatted command sequence is received
over the Internet. Adore also attempt to send sensitive system information to four
different email addresses.”

From a column at ZDNet: “To my complete lack of surprise, Linux 2.4.x includes basic support for FireWire and the addition
of SBP-2 drivers to the kernel source is evidently not far off. Clearly, someone is paying
attention over there. Windows also apparently has decent SBP-2 support today, though I
confess I am unable to try this out since I don’t have a FireWire-capable Windows box.”

ZDNet has a short item commenting on Wind River Systems’ purchase of Berkeley Software Design’s version of Unix. The Register mentions that the sale could impact Slackware Linux, because BSDi was acting as Slackware’s storefront.

tjhanson writes: “VNU Network News via Lexis-nexis has this story: “John Safa, a former cracker and CTO of security vendor BitArts, said: ‘The cracking community now has a C GBP decompiler, which unravels
application code. If you got on the inside of a network using this tool, you could do anything.'”

Wired: “Responding to heavy criticism, Microsoft says the terms of use on its Passport service are outdated, to be ignored, and will soon be changed. But does that mean the software company doesn’t want to own you?”

The Register: “Napster usage is on the increase again after its post-filter dip, online entertainment
market watcher Webnoize has reported.”

NetworkWorldFusion: “IBM is adding an online assessment tool, Linux support and a
second competency center for IBM non-uniform access
memory (NUMA) systems to its ASP Prime Program.”