BSD Today reports on Ogg Vorbis, a relatively new music compression system in the works. From the article “This article shares my experiences with building an Ogg Vorbis player, converting MP3s to Ogg Vorbis format, and then creating audio files from my music CDs. “The technology is patent-free, the code is open source, plugins for various popular audio players are available, and now the library code has been changed to use the BSD license.””

ZDNet reports that Compaq’s latest generation of its iPaq handheld system has 64M of RAM and two PC card slots.

The CBC reports that Rogers @Home cable in Ontario was down through most of the province Thursday night thanks to copper thieves who cut a fibre-optic cable while trying to steal wires.

ZDNet reports on the introduction of a new digital Internet/TV system which runs on Linux, and is HDTV-ready as well as supporting television and cable television signals.

Handheld sites are buzzing with rumors that PDA maker Handspring will announce a new version of its Visor device on Monday. Supposedly, the new gadget will be known as the “Visor Edge” to highlight its slim appearance. Full story at Wired News.

From CNET News.com: “Ximian, an open-source software company formerly known as Helix Code, believes it can help achieve Web services compatibility by porting the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) distributed-computing protocol to the Gnome user interface for Linux and Unix systems.”

Highlights of this week’s issue of the weekly news roundup for the Debian-Hurd mailing lists include: “Testing the new apt” … “The Hurd equivalent of Linux features” … “MIG vs. CORBA (Again).”

“Belgian security software firm Ubizen plans to roll out software to safeguard transactions made by mobile phone next month as its first foray into a new market potentially worth billions of dollars.” Read the Reuters report at InfoWorld.

From a press release at LinuxPR: “REDSonic, Inc., a creative new force within the embedded system marketplace and the developer of the flexible real-time Linux kernel, REDICE-LinuxTM, will showcase its most up-to-date products and technologies for embedded systems at ESC 2001, the world’s largest event devoted exclusively to embedded systems developers, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from April 10. REDSonic will exhibit its embedded Linux tools and technology through live presentations by building a network appliance, an embedded multimedia device, and demonstrate guaranteed quality of service (QoS) control by managing kernel resources.”

From a press release at LinuxPR: “From August 9th until August 12th, the campus of the University of Twente will feature a congress that is unique in its kind: Hackers at Large, or HAL 2001. The congress expects to receive thousands of guests from all over the world and from many different disciplines to debate issues ranging from advanced technical issues regarding some obscure aspect of the Internet to easy-to-understand lectures on some of the dangers of the information society, as well as many, many other topics. But more than debate, the guests at HAL2001 take ample time to get on-line, relax, build and discuss cool stuff, and engage in good old analog interfacing.”