It’s been announced before, but ComputerWorld has another story about Microsoft’s plans to release a limited expansion of its Windows
source-code sharing program that could “pave the way for ‘potentially hundreds’ of new customers,
including some corporate users, to gain access to the code.”

RIAA.com has both links and also a statement from Hilary Rosen about the case, calling the ruling “a victory for all creators.”

Slashdot has a story and review of “Pride Before The Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era.” Author John Heilemann “explains how
Microsoft was brought down by the arrogant, delusional monomania of
its founder, a man who had clearly come to believe in his own
immortality and was unable to grasp the realities of the world.”

Net-security.org has this item: “Three security holes have been fixed in the kernel. One involves ptrace, another
involves sysctl, and the last is specific to some Intel CPUs. All three security
holes involve local access only (they do not provide a hole to remote attackers
without a local
account). The ptrace and sysctl bugs provide local users with the potential to
compromise the root account. Neither has an active exploit available at the time
of this writing. The last security hole is a DOS (Denial Of Service) that does
not provide access to the root account but does allow any user with shell access
the ability to halt the CPU.”

Anonymous Reader tells us about this: “By the end of the trading day, struggling EMusic got a huge boost from Napter’s bad news. With the ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Napster must stop trading in copyrighted material, EMusic’s stock shot through the roof.”

The story’s at mp3newswire.net.

ZDNe’s take today’s Napster hearing: The court ruling allowed file-sharing site Napster to continue, but the ruling opened the door for millions of dollars in damages.
“We affirm the district court’s conclusion that plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of
the contributory copyright claim,” the judges wrote. More from CNN.

David N. Welton writes “February 12, 2001 The Apache Software Foundation today announced the launch of the
Apache Tcl project, with the goal of promoting the integration of the
Apache web server with the Tcl scripting language.”

Tcl (tool command language, pronounced “tickle”) is an open-source,
cross-platform scripting language Tcl has a strong history of use for
the web, with products such as AOLserver, and the widely used
StoryServer. Combined with Apache, the world’s most popular web
server, Tcl will make an excellent companion for back-end scripting
tasks.

“Tcl is a great language for the web – it’s small, light, easy to
learn, and has been used, developed and tested for a number of years”
said David Welton, vice president of Apache Tcl and author of
mod_dtcl. “It also has a large user base, and is a very active open
source project in its own right.”

tcl.apache.org will serve
as a point of reference for Apache-Tcl efforts, initially
hosting the mod_dtcl project, a fast and light implementation
of Tcl for Apache. The project was initially modeled after
PHP, a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting
language.

About Tcl

Tcl, was created by John K. Ousterhout at the University of California
at Berkeley in 1988. Originally conceived as a reusable, embeddable
language core for tools being developed by Dr. Ousterhout and his
colleagues, it has come to be much more. Tcl is used today in a wide
variety of applications including web scripting, test automation,
network/system management, EDA and CAD, and in many other fields.

For more information about Tcl, see http://dev.scriptics.com.

About the Apache Software Foundation

Founded in June 1999, the Apache Software Foundation provides
organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache
open-source software projects. Formerly known as the Apache Group,
the Foundation incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit
corporation to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist
beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable
contributions of intellectual property and financial support, and to
provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in
open-source projects.

For more information on the Apache Software Foundation, please see
http://www.apache.org/.

###

Interbind writes “Interbind Inc. announces the availability of the Interbind XML Messaging Server version 0.8 for free download at its developer website, developer.interbind.com.

Designed to facilitate communication with and among Web Services, the messaging server transports XML-based messages to and from nodes offering Web Services in a peer-to-peer network.

The primary features of the Interbind XML Messaging Server include:

· Easy XML-based configuration

· Pre-built XML message envelopes that support a variety of message types

· Java-to-XML serialization/deserialization
· Support for secure peer-to-peer connections
· Lightweight memory and processor requirements

The messaging server and its source code can be downloaded at developer.interbind.com. Documentation, tutorials and sample applications are also provided to help developers build new applications based on the messaging server. The developer site also has a support forum. Interbind is eager for feedback from the XML community .

Use of the Interbind XML Messaging server requires an XML parser that is either SAX2 or DOM compatible and Sun’s Java Runtime Environment. Development using the message server requires JDK 1.2 or later.

Interbind is a privately held developer of middleware for Web Services located in New York City. For more information please visit, www.interbind.com.”

Napster responds to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals injunction ruling today. Hank Barry, Napster CEO says the company is “disappointed” by the decision, and that the Court ruled on an “incomplete record.” There’s also a statement from Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who says “If we work together and let Members of Congress
know how important Napster is to us, we’ll succeed.”

CNN reports that NASA’s attempt to land the NEAR-Shoemaker research satellite on Eros, a near earth asteroid, was successful.