ZDNet tries to figure out what’s next with Napster. “The ultimate fate of the controversial technology may hinge on whether it is possible — or
impossible — to effectively police on the labyrinthine networks created by file-swapping software.
Monday’s appellate court ruling ordered Napster to police its networks ‘within the limits of the
system.’ As it has in the past, Napster will likely argue in its next appeal that it is technologically
impossible to conduct this policing at the massive level demanded by the recording studios.”

Jon Panker writes: “Open source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL have grown to become viable alternatives to traditional databases, said Mark S. Cotton, vice president of consulting for Great Bridge LLC, a company that specializes in providing services for its own distribution of PostgreSQL. In this question and answer interview Cotton said PostgreSQL is being used by manufacturers, Internet service providers and application service providers.” Read the full story on searchEnterpriseLinux.

BSD Today continues its DSL/NetBSD tutorial with an overview of Internet gateway configuration and online security rules.

In this week’s edition: Major changes to the new maintainer process, the status of security fixes continue to trickle in “ust as slowly as do any other updated packages from unstable,” and speaking of unstable, a few sentences near the end of the weekly missive are devoted to that subject.

From ZDNet UK: “Scientists at Keele University claim to have developed memory
technologies that will dramatically increase computer storage and
are promising to deliver a credit card-sized drive capable of
holding up to 10.8TB of data. However, examination of
documentation provided by the scientists has raised more
questions than answers.”

“A Dutch virus writer known as OnTheFly admitted Tuesday to writing the Anna Kournikova virus, as Excite@Home compiled evidence against a subscriber in the Netherlands who is believed to be the same person. “I didn’t do it for fun,” stated OnTheFly in a Web posting Tuesday. ‘I never wanted to harm the people who opened the attachment. But after all: it’s their own fault they got infected.’ ” Full story at ZDNet News.

From a press release at Internet Wire: “Linux2order, the online resource offering the largest and most current selection of Linux applications on the Internet, today announced it will donate 20% of it’s CD-ROM’s gross revenues from the new co-branded site kde.Linux2order.com to the KDE project.”

Issue #24 of Georg C. F. Greve’s monthly GNUsletter (oh, fine: newsletter) is hot off the presses. In this issue: A port of the xpaint program named GNU Paint, a GNU Bug Tracking System front-end by the name of Gnatsweb, and GNU Serveez, a server framework that provides routines and help for IP-based servers. This marks the second anniversary of Brave GNU World — congratulations, Georg.

A post at Linux Today from Alan Cox details the latest fixes and improvements in this incremental release of the 2.4.1 kernel. Among the changes: Cpuid on Cyrix processors should now work, the xmms cpu burn on i810 audio has been fixed, vfat’s mishandling of 16bit characters has been repaired, as has the pnic problems with the tulip driver.

LinuxWorld has a story on the use of Linux and Open Source software in French schools. According to Jean-Pierre Archambault of the French education ministry, the use of Linux in an educational setting “helps prevent software monopoly from blocking more important goals.” It would seem that the use of Open Source operating systems and software has given French students the freedom to innovate.