“Palm Inc. has agreed to acquire Extended Systems Inc., a provider of infrastructure software that allows enterprise applications to be accessed from handheld computers, in a transaction valued at about $264 million. The company is also reorganizing in the wake of the acquisition.” Read the report at Network World Fusion.

Info World reports that NakedWife, a particularly nasty Trojan worm that surfaced on Tuesday, didn’t spread far. While virus centers are calling the worm “high risk,” it appears only to have affected a small number of computers in Europe and North America.

“They’ve barely begun tackling the much-vaunted third-generation of wireless technology, called 3G, but leading companies in the industry are already laying the groundwork for what some are calling 4G. Researchers want to contribute their ideas to the development of an as-yet undefined “wireless world” that could become operational by around 2010.” Full story at Network World Fusion.

In this week’s issue.: Election updates, bug squashing party report, unstable trackers, and new dates for the Debian Conference.

“When eperl is installed setuid root, it can switch to the UID/GID of
the scripts owner. Although Debian doesn’t ship the program setuid
root, this is a useful feature which people may have activated
locally. When the program is used as /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nph-eperl the
bugs could lead into a remote vulnerability as well.” Updates and more information at LWN.net.

Virus protection is the hottest new software category for Palm handheld devices. ZDNet eWEEK takes a quick look at handheld anti-virus programs offered by F-Secure, Norton, Symantec, and McAfee.

If we had Slashdot-like department listings, this item might be filed under “beating-the-stain-that-used-to-be-a-dead-horse” — Napster is being sued by two new companies — the producer of the annual Grammy Awards and EMI Music. Full story at IDG.

From ZDNet: “Some analyst wonder if Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL) isn’t rushing Mac OS X out the door solely to meet the official March 24 launch date. Missing features, such as DVD support and notebook sleep functions, could mean the new operating system needs more time to ripen on the tree.”

ZDNet Interactive Week analyzes NTT DoCoMo’s recent $9 billion investment in AT&T’s wireless subsidiary. The writer notes that “AT&T has a history of making moves that alter the course of the wireless marketplace,” and some of those moves backed with NTT DoCoMo’s cash might ultimately mean that WAP won’t be the wireless standard of the future.

From Linux Journal: Bruce Perens gives the community an update on plans to bring HP’s discontinued OpenMail program into the realm of Open Source. Have patience, says Perens, and please stop writing HP management about taking the Open Source path.