CNET News.com reports on Linuxcare’s recent history and Thursday’s high-profile deals with Hewlett-Packard, Network Appliance, Maxtor, Tricord and SGI.

LinuxDevices editor Rick Lehrbaum comments on the data collected in last year’s Embedded Linux Market Survey: “One particularly intriguing outcome is that despite the obvious cost-sensitivity of embedded devices, the “free speech” aspect of Linux (i.e. source code is available) edged out “free beer” (i.e. no royalties) as the primary reason why developers are looking at embedding Linux for their designs.” Full commentary at ZDNet.

ZDNet reports: “Swedish telecoms equipment group Ericsson said on Friday
it was pulling out of making its own mobile phones and shedding thousands
of jobs in the handset business after reporting a worse than expected
fourth-quarter operating loss of $155 million.” The company plans to outsource mobile phone production to Flextronics International, Inc., the world’s third largest electronics manufacturer.

Network World Fusion covers the latest OEM hard drives from Fujitsu: “The 3.5-inch drives incorporate a new
high-density disk with an area density of 18.6G
bits per square inch – around 2.5 times greater
than the capacity of Fujitsu’s current products. A
single platter drive with a capacity of 18.4G bytes
is available, as are versions with 36.7G bytes and
73.5G bytes of storage space. The drives have an
8M-byte transfer buffer, average read seek time of
4.5 milliseconds and an internal data transfer rate
of 84M bit/sec.”

“The use of Java to build application servers is gaining in popularity and
is in fact dominating that market. Two leading vendors in this realm, BEA
Systems and iPlanet, have been certified for the Java 2 Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) platform specification from Sun Microsystems. IBM is likely to follow
suit.

Driving the greater acceptance of J2EE-based application servers is the
promise that they can be interchangeable, no matter the vendor.” Full story at InfoWorld.

Reuters via InfoWorld reports on the FCC’s recently-concluded wireless spectrum action. Sales were a record $16.86 billion, with Verizon Wireless scooping up over 100 of the 422 licenses available.

MSNBC reports: “Much to the chagrin of an army of skeptics and
ill-wishers, the Secure Digital Music Initiative lives.
Though executive director Leonardo Chiariglione
announced on Tuesday that he would step down to
focus on the expanded duties of his day job at Telecom
Italia, SDMI will continue pressing forward with its
unpopular mission: establishing a framework for record
labels to market online music that cannot be freely
copied and distributed over the Internet. There is even
talk that the famously deliberative body will start picking
up the pace.”

Version 1.1.6 of the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) is now available. CUPS provides a portable printing layer for UNIX-based operating systems. This version includes new security enhancements and bug fixes. More information and download at cups.org.

“Former versions of the exmh program used /tmp for storing temporary
files. No checks were made to ensure that nobody placed a symlink
with the same name in /tmp in the meantime and thus was vulnerable to
a symlink attack. This could lead to a malicious local user being
able to overwrite any file writable by the user executing exmh.” Full details at LWN.net.

LWN.net posts: “Versions older than 3.23.31 have a buffer overflow vulnerability that
could be exploited remotely depending on how the database access is
configured (via web, for example).”