Slashdot reports on “Anti-spamming Act” (HR 1017), an anti-forged email bill. As at least 2 commenters have pointed out, however, the “Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001” (HR 95) is better targetted at spam.

In a startling move, Dr. Watson has defected to Linux! Ironicly, it’s (a) Segfault which reports on this change of jobs for Dr. Watson.

From the humor site, Segfault: “Troubled San Jose-based Poindexter Brewery has decided to give its beer away for free, generating
revenue instead by providing services and support.

According to Poindexter CEO Flo ‘Mudshark’ Eddie, ‘We read about some brewery called Eazel, giving
their beer away for free. And they got 12 million big ones in venture capital! Were not sure about how to
make money off this service and support thing, but neither is Eazel and look how far they got.’ “

According to Slashdot, SGI will port Linux to the Origin 3000 hardware platform.

RC1 of Progeny Debian, a fork of the Woody tree by some Debian developers, is available for download and feedback. Debianplanet has more details.

From LinuxWorld: ‘It worked for Apple, but not for Oracle. Now Trolltech will try to catch customers while they’re
still in college with its Qt University program. By giving away Qt to computer science departments
Trolltech hopes to create a new crop of Qt developers. If the strategy works, GNOME may face
an uphill battle versus KDE.’

The Standard reports that Mp3.com will begin charging its artists to be listed on its site at $19.99 a month. Currently, nearly 150,000 artists are using the ‘Payback for Playback’ service and all will be required to start paying. Mp3.com distributes up to $1,000,000 per month to popularly listened-to musicians, but stands to make nearly $3,000,000 a month from those same artists with this fee.

ZDNet reports that the Mir space station’s death will be recorded from an aircraft and broadcast on the Internet four hours later. The 15 year old Russian space station is due to splash down in the Pacific within the week. Nervous about the consequences of a misplaced crash, the Russian government has taken out a $200 million dollar insurance policy (story at the CBC) to cover for potential damage.

Security Focus warns of a potential local exploit in the ‘elm’ mail reader. On some versions, arbitrary code can be executed from the ‘subject’ field on the command line, possibly allowing a user to change the contents of another’s mail.

ZDNet reports that 2 Californians are facing criminal charges related to spam – unsolicited email – after their endeavors crashed a company’s servers from excessive mail routing.