“The Mozilla Organization released the Milestone Mozilla 0.8 edition of its Mozilla browser-suite today on its march to Mozilla 1.0. The Mozilla Milestone 0.8 browser-suite is cross-platform and builds are available for the Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and several UNIX platforms. Source code is available if you want to custom compile your own Mozilla Milestone 0.8 build.” More information at MozillaQuest.com.

“The LiViD team is proud to release the first official version of Open Media System, our Open Source
media and DVD player! This release has been in development for more than a year by many
developers from around the world. Download, install, enjoy your DVDs in Linux!”

The mid-February issue of the Linux Gazette is now available. In this issue the Answer Gang responds to your Linux cries for help, we lear all about taming rand() and random(), and for you privacy fanatics a mustn’t-miss special on securely erasing a hard drive with Perl.

BotSpot reports on recent developments within the ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Experiment) Open Source chatterbot community. Winner of the 2001 Loebner Prize for the most human-like computer software, ALICE is one of the few sophisticated chat bots hat is made available under the GNU Public License (GPL).

Press release from LinuxPR: “Interface
Concept, the Brittany, France-based communications infrastructure enabler
has selected the Hard Hat (TM) Linux (R) operating system from
MontaVista Software Inc. to run the company’s new high performance
LAN-WAN remote access communications server and Ethernet switches.”

Michael Hudson posts his first-ever edition of the python-dev summary, a twice-monthly message that summarizes the traffic on the python-dev mailing list. Previous editions were posted by Andrew Kuchling. In this issue: “Python 2.1a2 was released on Feb. 2” … “Michael
Hudson posted the results of an extended benchmarking session using
Marc-Andre Lemburg’s pybench suite” … “Python’s release schedule.’Python’s release schedule.”

From ZDNet: “The truck driver accused of running down and killing a man while typing a text message was
sentenced to five years imprisonment Wednesday for what was condemned as a “wickedly
dangerous” activity.”

Fad or practical computing application? While the figurative jury has yet to render a verdict on P2P, the usual high-tech suspects aren’t waiting around. Today’s edition of Network World Fusion reveals that Sun Microsystems is working on a software platform for peer-to-peer computing. The company hopes to provide a simple code layer to help other vendors build P2P applications. It also hopes to do something with P2P and Java, oh boy.

The hits (or verbal body-slams) just keep on coming for ICANN. As if annoying just about everyone with a interest in its operations and triggering a Congressional probe of its activities wasn’t enough, BBC News reports that at least one of its members has taken to speaking out against it. Ken Auerback, ICANN’s North American representative, has come out swinging at his organization, calling the Net governing body “secretive” and “undemocratic.”

All of this talk of Napster and injuctions and lawsuits has renewed interest in copyright protection. Digital rights management, or DRM, is a white-hot area of copy protection right now, aimed at making sure people like you don’t copy or distribute anything you haven’t properly paid for. That, says Andreas Pfeiffer in a special report for ZDNet News, is exactly why current DRM specs should fail. Perhaps if those with a stake in DRM didn’t treat all of their customers like criminals, fewer folks would be inclined to view copy protection as a bad thing.