MacWorld reviews the latest Mac offering: “Looking past the candy-colored GUI, command-line partisans could find a solid
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix implementation, complete with everything they’ve come to expect
from a ‘real’ multiuser, multitasking operating system. Suddenly, old-time hacks could count Mac OS among
their favored few.

The changes made to OS X since the beta will only reinforce that enthusiasm. While users familiar with more
mainstream Unix implementations face a handful of interface oddities, the heart of the system they know and
love beats proudly underneath Apple’s shiny, polished skin.”

The two companies have taken another step toward a merger, according to a press release at LinuxPR.

Mikael Pawlo writes: “Gnuheter reports (in Swedish) that the Swedish government will work together with the United Kingdom and France to make software patentable in the EC.
Swedish Minister of Trade, Leif Pagrotsky, informed the Swedish EU council of the governments concerns and positive attitude towards software patents. The council is reported to have joined in on Pagrotskys and the governments views.
The UK Patent office has already stated a clear support for software patents, however put very unclear in words:
” The Governments conclusion is thus to reaffirm the principle that
patents are for technological innovations. Software should not be
patentable where there is no technological innovation, and
technological innovations should not cease to be patentable merely
because the innovation lies in software.’
UK PTO on software patents.”

From LinuxPR: YASS (Yet Another Security Site) ?
Yes & No.

Yes, firetrench.com is another Internet site and yes it will address security.

No, firetrench.com is a site that aims to serve the risk/security community by
providing interaction, a news feed, an information resource, a regular magazine.

As a community site, we want to develop with our readers – we are not a
corporate site e-trading one-size-fits-all products.

We aim to serve the whole risk community – so that means White Hat, Grey Hat,
Black Hat -Security, Risk Avoidance & Management, Continuity, Health &
Safety, and more…

At LWN.net: “The eMail access daemons impad(8), ipop2d(8) and ipop3d(8) of SuSE 6.1
are vulnerable to several buffer overflows. Due to a misconfiguration
these vulnerbilities could be triggered remotely after a user had been
authenticated.”

An anonymous reader writes: “EMusic announced today that it has launched proprietary monitoring software that continually searches Napster’s network for EMusic MP3s made available on the service. The software not only seeks out these files, but it automatically reports the infringing track names to Napster Inc. for filtering. The story’s at mp3newswire.net.”

Reuters has a followup story on the earlier Red Hat press release. Wall Street was expecting a one cent loss per share, and the company actually broke even on that front, only losing $600,000 overall. More from CNet.

The announcement’s available at LWN.net. You can get a copy at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/.

From LWN.net: Squishdot 1.0.0 is now available from
http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisw/Squishdot/. Here are some of the changes: HTML postings are parsed to remove harmful tags. Unclosed tags are
closed; made Squishdot work with TinyTable or TinyTablePlus. Also made
Tinytables work in 2.3.0; reimplemented email notifications. No HTML mail is now sent.
HTML in postings is converted to text before being mailed out.

David Sweet tells us: Andamooka, the online open content library, is proud to host the following books:

• GNU Autoconf, Automake, and
  Libtool (New Riders) by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian
  Lance Taylor. The standard open source software source code distribution system is based on the tools discussed in the book.
  • The CVS
    Book (Coriolis) by Karl Fogel. A complete introduction,
    tutorial and reference to CVS (Concurrent Versions System).

  • Lessons In
    Electric Circuits by Tony Kuphaldt has been updated. Issues
    discussed in the annotation have been addressed and many other things
    have changed.

  • Professional
    Programmer’s Guide to Fortran77 by Clive Page.

  These books may be read (in full), annotated, and discussed on Andamooka.

  Improved Book Searches

  Andamooka searches are now performed by an implementation of LiSEn, an open source,
  Perl-based search engine. The result is more relevant, ranked hits,
  faster searches, and context cues to help identify the best hits.
  
  “