From the American Bar Association: “Critics should have been more alert back
in 1998, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit,
which hears patent appeals, paved the way for Bezos’ suit with its
watershed decision, State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F.3d 1360. The ruling, which allowed patents
for long-verboten business methods, opened the floodgates to a deluge
of applications, mostly from Internet and software companies scampering
to get into the market.”

Linux-Mandrake has released version 8.0 beta 1 — named “Traktopel” — of its distribution. Included: Linux kernel 2.4.2, KDE 2.1, GNOME environment with the Nautilus file manager, and groupware suite Evolution. Remember, this is a beta release — your should expect that not every feature will work perfectly, and some may not function at all.

CNET News.com reports that Linux enterprise shipments increased by 24 percent last year, and that Windows shipments increased by 20 percent for the same time period. Revenues from Linux shipments, however, were significantly less than those from closed source companies.

VNUnet.com reports on Phil Zimmermann’s move to security company Hush Communications. “Zimmermann, formerly a senior fellow at Network Associates, said he plans to move Hush’s
free web based secure email service, Hushmail, over from Blowfish to OpenPGP-based
encryption.

OpenPGP is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ratified standard based around PGP
5, which Hush and Zimmermann hope will become a global standard as the public demand for
secure communications increases. OpenPGP as a development platform can be used to
develop email encryption as well as roll out digital signatures and key management systems,
said Zimmermann.”

Ananova.com, you know the cartoon woman with the green hair, reports that “IT security experts are warning Gnutella users to be on the look-out for a
new virus.

Kaspersky Labs say a virus file called Mandragore has been intercepting
traffic on the network.

Gnutella enables users to locate and exchange media files and is seen
as a successor to Napster.” More from Newsbytes.

From theStandard.com: “Maybe someday we’ll have all the laws we need to govern the
Internet. This, however, is not the week, as the legal system
slouches toward a precedent for anonymous online speech.

An L.A. judge has dismissed a lawsuit attempting to collect
damages from anonymous message-board posters. Essentially,
the judge ruled that online banter about companies is too
out-there to be considered libel — they’re obviously opinions,
not facts.”

Reuters reports that Amazon.com plans free music downloads as a way to pump up sagging CD sales.

Jon Panker writes: “When Aaron J. Seigo, 25, chief executive officer of Mount Linux in Calgary, Alberta, and his partners looked at how to make a profit in the new open source economy, they decided the answer was to provide a service, not a product. So they came up with a suite of automated services targeted at system administration, an ongoing daily task for which businesses have a budget. So far their strategy seems to work.” Read the
story on searchEnterpriseLinux.com.

Jon Panker writes: “IBM Corp. is trying to sell Linux to four focus markets: retail, small- to medium-sized businesses which find the price is right, telecommunications companies, which cluster racks of Linux-based servers together, and financial companies, which can consolidate hundreds of Unix servers onto a single mainframe, said Scott Handy, director of Linux solutions marketing for the company’s software group. He talked about what IBM is doing to make Linux work for businesses in this interview.” Read the story on searchEnterpriseLinux.com.

Moppie writes that Pinehead.com has a little tutorial on installing a new hard disk and copying the files in Linux.