Slashdot Mirror

jvj24601 writes "A columnist at news.com reports that Network Solutions has recently changed its contracts -- it now 'owns' the domain name and can take it back at will. This has been held up in court. I am especially appalled that their agreement states 'NSI may terminate "domain name registration services" if the registrant uses them for "any improper purpose, as determined in our sole discretion."'" Time to check the DomainNameBuyersGuide again ...

charper writes: "News.com is reporting that a firm hired by Metallica has fingered more than 335,000 Napster users (who were allegedly) trading their music. They're seeking to have them banned from Napster. " Check out our original piece, and remember - you can always PayLars!

Will in Seattle writes "cNet has a story on RealNetworks using code from Mozilla.org's open-source browser code in a private-label version of its media player and server for Web broadcaster Global Media. This version lets RealNetworks' system stream and display Web elements including HTML and Macromedia Flash animation files, and you can download their mods here. "

bitty writes: "This article over at CNET is yet more proof that filtering content to 'protect your children' just isn't the answer." This is interesting - it's talking about Cyber Patrol's "white list," which is a deliberately-selected set of appropriate sites. If there is this kind of bias in their white list, what's lurking in their black list? We may never know, because it's (apparently) illegal to look at it.

www.sorehands.com writes, "CNet News reports that the ACLU is appealing the CPHack ruling. It should be quite interesting. Especially in the light of the ruling in federal court that makes source code free speech. It is possible that the court may rule that the source code can be posted, but not the executable code. It will be very difficult for Mattel to show damage or harm from publication now. Mattel changed the code, so CPHack is obsolete and will not work on the current version."

Repton writes, "Another one from CNET's News.com: A commission set up by the government to look into ways to keep youngsters from Internet smut has realized that they have no funding. This is a sad state of affairs, but somehow I don't feel too much sympathy." Perhaps people "charged with evaluating high-tech tools and other methods to keep online pornography away from children," but on a beer budget, should enjoy a few hours reading through the Censorware Project's Web site. At a library in Utah, say.

Maybe Peacefire's timing is bad. Two courts have recently said that the reverse-engineered DeCSS program is illegal to publish in the United States, and UCITA gets closer every second. Yet Peacefire today released a program that reverse-engineers the encryption on a list of sites blocked by a major censorware product. Maybe T-shirts that say 'X-Stop has a 68% error rate for blocking student homepages' will get classified as munitions next. Bennett Haselton shares his thoughts (below) on corporate crypto.

Bennett Haselton is the founder and head of Peacefire, an activist group to support the free-speech rights of young people. He suggests that you might want to download the X-Stop "smoking gun" evidence (4MB) before the company has a chance to remove it from their server.

The feature below was written by Mr.Haselton.

X-Stop is an Internet censoring program with an encrypted database of 370,000 URL's blocked under various categories: Sex, Drugs, Rock `n' Roll, etc. Their competitors like SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol also do not publish their blocked site lists; the officially given reason is to keep kids from using the lists to find smut on the Internet. This is silly, given how easy it is to find Internet porn without the aid of X-Stop's secret database (although if you still want to, you can download our codebreaker, follow the instructions to get the X-Stop list and decrypt it, and help yourself). But for the next part of our report, after we decoded the URL list, we looked at the first 50 URL's in the .edu domain that were still valid, and found that 34 of them were regular student home pages with nothing offensive (hence the "68% error rate" t-shirt slogan). None of those 34 students who responded to our e-mails could think of why X-Stop would want to block their pages.

X-Stop admits on their Web site that their database is put together by a Web spider called "Mudcrawler" and not by human reviewers, but even for a machine, a 68% error rate is pretty bad. And even though the real reason why these lists are encrypted is obviously to keep competitors from stealing them, this also makes it much harder for third parties to find out what the programs really block. In fact, X-Stop had once claimed that every URL on their list was reviewed by a human before getting blocked, but cyber lawyer Jonathan Wallace called them on it when he published "The X-Stop Files" in 1997, asking why X-Stop blocked several sites like the Quakers home page, the AIDS Quilt, and parts of Jonathan's own e-zine, The Ethical Spectacle. Peacefire also put up a page in 1998 about sites blocked by X-Stop, including an affirmative action site and a blind children's hospital. But these examples were all found through trial and error; today is the first day that the entire list of URL's has been made public. And to determine the 68% figure, it was necessary to have a copy of the entire list, so that the first 50 blocked sites could be used as a random sample.

So far, this is more or less the same story that took place in 1997 with another blocking program, CYBERsitter, right down to Jonathan Wallace posting a page about CYBERsitter and getting his site blocked. First, several people posted articles criticizing CYBERsitter's policies, and slowly CYBERsitter's public image deteriorated as word got out that they were blocking sites which criticized their company (even Time magazine got blocked, and then posted an article about how they found themselves on CYBERsitter's list). Then in April 1997, Peacefire released a program that broke the encryption on CYBERsitter's list of blocked URL's. CYBERsitter sent Peacefire a threatening letter demanding that we take down the program and remove all of our links to CYBERsitter's Web page. Jim Tyre, a volunteer lawyer and future founding member of the Censorware Project, sent CYBERsitter a reply telling them they had no case, and we never heard from them again. But UCITA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the two court injunctions against the right to post DeCSS, didn't exist in 1997. If we had released the CYBERsitter codebreaker today, would CYBERsitter actually file a lawsuit?

The outcome of the DeCSS court cases could, in fact, determine the rights of a private citizen to embarrass a big software company by reverse engineering their products and catching them in a lie. It's easy to forget the importance of legal protection for reverse engineering, because sometimes public opinion is enough: RealNetworks never sued Richard Smith when he revealed that copies of RealPlayer included a "globally unique identifier" to track user's listening habits, and Microsoft never sued Andrew Schulman when he discovered that Windows 3.1 threw up fake error messages about DR-DOS. These were large companies that would have been crucified if they had tried to sue someone for discovering something that the public thought they had a right to know anyway. But legal protections are still important, because sometimes public opinion isn't enough - when the software company doesn't have much of an online reputation to worry about, or when then they have a reputation but they don't care about it.

The RIAA, with their campaigns against MP3 technology and reverse-engineering SDMI, is an example of an organization that doesn't care about their online image - and why should they, since we all download our music for free anyway. CYBERsitter is another good example - they do care about their reputation, but in 1997 their image was that of a children's guardian angel and an ally in fighting government censorship, almost immune to criticism. It took an enormous amount of bad press - letters from CYBERsitter's CEO threatening ISP's and flaming people in general, and at one point actually mail-bombing a lady who sent them a complaint - before even advocates of blocking software started distancing themselves from the company. Even today, CYBERsitter's public image is fairly rosy, and their campaigns of legal harassment hardly affected their reputation at all. (What had you heard about CYBERsitter before you read this article?) It's hard to imagine Microsoft, for example, filing a similar lawsuit without embarrassing themselves and turning their intended target into a martyr. The real threat to "reverse engineering for the public good" is from medium-sized companies, small enough that not everything they do will get in the news, but still big enough to afford lots of lawyers.

This threat affects not just programmers, but even journalists who get anonymous tip-offs - like Brock Meeks and Declan McCullagh, who were threatened with an FBI investigation by CYBERsitter in 1996, after they published their "Keys to the Kingdom" article about sites that CYBERsitter and other "censorware" programs blocked. The part of the article that got them in so much trouble was this excerpt from CYBERsitter's bad- word file:

[up][the,his,her,your,my][ass,cunt,twat][,hole]
[wild,wet,net,cyber,have,making,having,getting,giving,phone][sex...]
[,up][the,his,her,your,my][butt,cunt,pussy,asshole,rectum,anus]
[,suck,lick][the,his,her,your,my][cock,dong,dick,penis,hard on...]
[gay,queer,bisexual][male,men,boy,group,rights,community,activities...]
[gay,queer,homosexual,lesbian,bisexual][society,culture]
[you][are][,a,an,too,to][stupid,dumb,ugly,fat,idiot,ass,fag,dolt,dummy]

If this now counts as a "trade secret" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then our list of the 50 .edu sites blocked by X-Stop - and the study that found the 68% error rate - could be declared illegal. And under UCITA, CYBERsitter could even claim the enforceability of these excerpts from their license agreement:

Reverse Engineering Prohibited
Unauthorized reverse engineering of the Software, whether for edcucational, fair use, or other reason is expressly forbidden. For the purposes of this license the term "reverse engineering" shall apply to any and all information obtained by such methods as decompiling, decrypting, trial and error, or activity logging.

Non-Disclosure
Unauthorized disclosure of CYBERsitter operational details, hacks, work around methods, blocked sites, and blocked words or phrases are expressly prohibited.

So any CYBERsitter user who even discusses what the program blocks, would be in violation. Not that CYBERsitter would enforce this against everybody, but they probably would have liked to enforce it against Brock and Declan.

At this point, we don't know how X-Stop will respond to our report. But we do know that for all of their bluster, CYBERsitter never actually sued Brock, Declan or Peacefire. Given that CYBERsitter pursued the matter for months (and the fact that Brock and Declan had actual money), if CYBERsitter gave up, it's because they had no case. If the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, UCITA, or the DVD court rulings change that situation, then it will become much harder to criticize blocking software - or any kind of software - except for the user interface and other things that users can "see" without looking under the hood.

Palin Majere writes, "News.com is reporting that Intel is once again having problems with its RAMBUS memory chipsets. This time, it's affecting the i820 and i840 chipsets, and is located in the chipsets (MRH and MTH) that allow customers to use regular SDRAM memory instead of RAMBUS memory. It causes memory corruption and has already caused Intel to cancel three motherboard designs as a result. " With the continuing shortage of high-end Pentium processors, and stuff like this, it's no wonder that AMD has been doing better and better.

Sc00ter writes "C|Net News reports 'RealNames, a company that substitutes complicated Web addresses with simple keywords, is warning its users that its customer database has been hacked, and that user credit card numbers and passwords may have been accessed.' Complete story here." Remember when NSI teamed up with Centraal, the creators of RealNames?

Beta Master writes "CNet reports that sales of Linux for servers are higher than sales for any other operating system except WinNT. IDG marketing group statistics are included. Full story here."

C|Net is publishing a story about a Stanford University Senior who reversed-engineered the Napster server protocol. The story also mentions a Web page in SourceForge which gives links to various Napster clients for different OS's. I wonder how many new Napster servers clones we'll have soon.

aibrahim writes "CNET's News.com is reporting Intel's attempt to ban VIA chips and chipsets from U.S. import. This does not yet include, but may be extended to, VIA's Joshua processor. The ban seems to be based on the violation of intellectual property agreements related to Intel's 'P6 bus.' " For more details on this case, read about their long-running legal battle.

Internet Freedom ("the voice of free speech") announced its winners of the 1999 Journalism Awards. Awards went to Courtney Macavinta for investigative journalism on the net, Salon for being an organization with high standards in writing, and my friend Keith Dawson for being an individual with high standards in writing. We won't embarrass the winner of the award for "Internet Article of Shame" by repeating it here - if you want to know, go see for yourself.

dafunn writes "CNet is reporting that the WTO is in agreement over extending the current Net tax ban for another 18 to 24 months. I don't know how long this will last, but it looks like temporary good news for e-commerce in general. The story is availible online. "

ecampbel writes "News.com is running a story about a company called iCraveTV.com offering live streaming network TV feeds for Canadian Internet users (an area code is required to view the streams). Most of the stations offered are Canadian, but a few Buffalo, NY stations are offered as well. This is obviously the logical conclusion of streaming media, and is scaring the pants off the local network affiliates."

Amigan writes " C|Net news.com is reporting on VP Al Gore's visit to Microsoft's campus today includes a statement from the Vice President that "...he expected that the White House would get involved in any settlement talks between the company and the Justice Department when antitrust remedies get discussed. Why would the White House need to be involved?"

emerson writes "News.com is reporting that Hotmail has finally taken the plunge and decided to implement the MAPS RBL spam "blackhole" list. The article notes that they have seen a marked decrease in spam in just a short time. Read the whole article." More and more ISPs seem to be jumping on the MAPS RBL bandwagon. It's a very good thing IMO, especially for the "free" e-mail services that attract spammers the same way picnics attract ants.

arban writes "According to this article on CNET, Philips is discontinuing the Nino, their WinCE base machine. " Phillips is citing lack of sales and consumer response to WinCE machine. On the other side of the coin, Handspring has begun taking orders from their new Palm-OS handheld. Nice and cheap.

News.com is reporting that AMD will release a 700 MHz Athlon this week, pushing them even further ahead in the MHz race against Intel. I hope it works well, because the article also points out that AMD is still not doing well financially...

xTg writes "News.com is reporting that Excite@HOME is restructuring its divisions to facilitate a merger with AOL. The most important question in my mind: Does this mean I have to pay more for my cable modem now in exchange for AOL "premium" content? Does AOL like linux? blah." I don't care whether it's AOL or @home, as long as I can keep using Linux with my cable modem and they don't jack the price too hard. Whatever. We customers are nothing but pawns in all of this until the cable monopolies either get some solid competition or are forced to open their lines to outside ISPs. I second xTg's "blah."Update: 10/01 10:48 by H : Apparently, the deal is being denied by AT&T.

BRTB writes "It seems that Intel has actually done something right: realized that its new 820 chipset (with Rambus memory support and speed increases) is so expensive for computer builders and end users - on the order of $500 added to the cost of an 820-equipped machine - that it's decided to cut back on production. Check out the News.com article here."

Justin Ng writes "CNet reports that the 8MB Palm Vx is due October 4th, and as a result Palm V and Palm IIIx models will be slashed in price. Read about it here. " Seems like it will be what the the Palm IIIx was to the Palm III. Wonder what sort of upgrade path will be provided...

TheTomcat writes "Big deal. Another MP3 player, huh? Not quite. This story at news.com talks about a new MP3 device that plays MP3 CD's, audio CDs and comes with a built-in FM tuner. While it has no capabilities to store songs (like the Empeg or the Diamond Rio), this would be IDEAL for my car. Hook it up to a decent power supply, an amp, and voila, out goes my current CD deck. It even comes with 10 seconds of anti-skip for Construction season (aka Summer), a remote control, and a built-in EQ. I'm drooling. [scheduled release: November]"

C|Net talked with Marc, but we got hold of Red Hat's Donnie Barnes yesterday, and interrogated, er, asked him questions. Click below to learn more about what to do with IPO money (Hint: Think missle-toting Lear jets), software patents, open source licensing, and trademark issues.

One of our first and most pressing questions for Donnie was, "What the heck are they going to do with all of this fresh money?" The answer, as one would expect, was some mumbo-jumbo, with some hints of future plans. Barnes said, "We will certainly grow development, marketing, sales, etc." And to whet the appetite of users, "You can certainly expect the 'grow development' part to include some neat new toys for Linux, though we don't preannounce new features. ;-)."

So the company itself will be growing, as we would expect, and the staff will be growing as well. However, what's interesting is the comments on where it will grow.

According to Barnes, "International expansion is a key area for us," which is "very expensive." It is partly due to the sheer expense that they have not really pursued this area before. Some of the shifting in this direction can be seen already, in actions like the severing of the relationship with their former Japanese distributor. In that case Red Hat "basically chose to enter the Japanese market in a bigger way and bring our products and services into that area directly." At the current time, they plan to focus on a European expansion first, to be followed by an Asian expansion soon after.

Waidaminute! Europe? Isn't there already a certain Germanic company established over there? Well, yes. We pressed Barnes about moving into what's considered to be S.u.S.E. Territory, and, on a broader scale, what's going to happen with the expansion of Linux-based companies and competition that will happen between them.

Barnes's response is one that Bob Young has been giving for quite some time; that rather then trying to play a zero-sum game, taking users away from each other, the aim of the Linux companies is to make the entire pie bigger so that /every/ company can grow. Well, every company but Microsoft, I guess, but the point is still there. Both CT and I find this to be a bit idealistic, but given the current atmosphere of change, maybe it will be how things fall out - we'll see how things shape up over the next six months to a year.

So with all this money: International Expansion, more developers, marketing and saleses staff. And, for the record, "...no, there are no big ticket surprises like Lear Jets..."

However, Marc might be purchasing a Porsche dealership. (Note: Joke! Don't sue me, Marc. Please).

The question that everyone had, whether they got the letter, didn't get the letter or just watched the fireworks was the E*Trade/Red Hat stock situation. In summary, the numbers broke down as following:
5000 open source developers were invited to participate
1300 responded, indicating interest
1150 of those were ultimately able to participate

Looks pretty good, right? It'd be interesting to know how many of those 1150 had to go back and try again, but c'est la vie. When asked about RH's feelings on the stock offering, Barnes said, "We feel that an over 88% participation rate was very good for the community at large." We talked about the people angry about the situation, whether or not a lot of the people originally banned were able to get in. His response: "Most of the angry people were [able to get in], but the bumps we had in the way caused them to be confused as to where they were and what level of participation they could expect. But at the end, most of the angry people were able to participate and I think came away happy."

What I thought was interesting was what precipitated the whole meltdown: Bad Information? Clash of Cultures? Red Hat's answer: "Mostly lack of information, and some bad information from E*TRADE's 'systems.'"

Additionally, "Sure, the open source community meeting big business and high finance was part of it too. Both sides needed education about the other, and I think lots of education happened. :)" I'm sure many of the companes looking at similar situations watched the RH IPO closely, trying to figure out what they did right, and what they can do differently. Barnes recommends examining what happened with them, and also shopping around. The latter part to that comment is the interesting part: Not dissing E*Trade, and Barnes does say they would at least shop them against other brokerage houses, but I think that the lesson learned here is to make sure of the house you use, especially after watching the Red Hat fiasco.

And given the recent hoopla over Unisys's perceived attempt to charge for GIFs that use the LZW patent, and Red Hat's closeness with major patent holders like IBM and Hewlett-Packard it seemed appropriate to talk about software patents. Red Hat's take on software patents: "Well, I think it should be fairly obvious that software patents are a bad idea in general and we are not in favor of them." Additionally, when it comes to big-boys like IBM, HP and others they "...will be working to try to lobby in the proper areas to help this issue. Yes, we do care about that stuff and have already begun talking to folks." (Note: I envisioned Bob Young with a flamethrower in the IBM Corporate Lobby)

Despite this, Barnes allowed for the fact that "Given current regulations you may see RH own patents one day. That may be unavoidable until the current way they are handled is changed." RMS would be displeased, but Barnes said that "What folks do with these patents, otoh, can be vasty different." That's an odd world, but I think it's just a further sign of how messed up the US Patent Office is, regarding software patents.

The issue of software patents led to talk about the other software licenses that have come out, like the APSL and Sun Community Source License. As you would expect, Red Hat would like to see fewer open source licenses, but "...at the end of the day, as long as they are truly open source and companies are *using* them, I don't really care." Barnes is pleased to see that Sun is taking steps to making good software more widely availible. I asked if Sun was viewed as being a competitor. Barnes says that perhaps, but that RH is trying to make fundamental changes to the way software is built. "Perhaps Sun will join. They have taken steps in that direction so far, so they could be an ally."

Oh, and again for the record, Hurricane Dennis got Barnes "personally quite wet."

The last question sparked a lot of back-and-forth, regarding the whole Red Hat trademark issue.

(Note: To get background on this, read the original article, and the subsequent follow-up with a letter from Bob Young.)

The following, according to Barnes, is what's going on: "We have to protect our trademark. People were selling hand-burned CDs and using our name, box image, and logo to do it. We had customers complain vehemently to us directly about that as they felt burned. We had to take action to keep that from happening." This was what sparked the original issue with Amazon, and how it appeared that Red Hat was banning anyone from using their name in any way unlicensed by them. The issue, then, is, how do people know what they're getting? For example, people want to know what they're getting when they buy Cheapbytes/LinuxMall/Bob's1$LinuxEmporium/LinuxCentral Linux. Are they getting Debian, Suse, Red Hat, Caldera etc.? Recognizing that Red Hat has a valid brand they must protect, where does that leave the manufacturers? RH's answer: "If they ship "Red Hat Linux" as their own "Cheapbytes Linux", then it must *be* Red Hat Linux. We can verify that with PGP signatures and the like. They can say it contains Red Hat Linux, but they can't explicitely *call* it that." For example, under this scheme, they could "call it `Foo Linux which contains Red Hat Linux 6.0' or something similar." What they can't do, however, would be to release a CD with a PGP signature that checks out, but call it Red Hat Linux. Only Red Hat can explicity title their distribution "Red Hat Linux". And if a company puts out a CD saying it "Contains Red Hat" and the PGP doesn't check out (e.g. modified from original or something, then "they can't say that and we'd have cause to have the product sales stopped."

Phew. So, how do you handle something like Mandrake-Linux? Can you call say "Derived from Red Hat Linux?" Barnes points out that he's not a trademark lawyer, so don't hold him to be a legal litmus test, but that, yes, that will be possible. (Note:More guidelines on this will be coming out soon. Keep an eye on Red Hat's site for details.)

But when it comes to recognition, of course Red Hat appreciates being recognized for having contributed, e.g. Mandrake putting "Derived from Red Hat" on the CD. As Barnes says, "Acknowledgment of one's hard work is always welcome. We just want it done properly... they can take Internet bits and build their own name. You don't see us claiming the name of every other distribution that contributed some code to RH, do you? But they can take our code and use it. That's what this is all about."

Wrap-up:: Interesting to talk with Donnie, and you can see that the quiet period has been hard on them - being unable to respond to comments would be, I suppose. It seems that the basic direction of Red Hat remains unchanged; that is, commitment to the GPL, working with the industry on software patent issues, and trying to get people to join the "movement." The greatest concern that CT and I is how all of this money will affect them as an organization, but I suppose that's an issue for the greater Linux universe as well. Only time will tell. And, on that platitudianal note..

disclaimer:Hemos owns shares in Red Hat

Will in Seattle writes "Marc Ewing, Chief Technology Officer of Red Hat Software, opens up, in an interview with cNet, about Microsoft, the IPO, and more" C|Net gets Marc, and Slashdot get's Donnie? Waaait a minute! (We love ya Donnie!) Our interview with Donnie J Barnes (which has more meat than this interview) should be up tomorrow.

Mad Browser writes "Nintendo announced a new handheld game device that runs on a 32-bit ARM processor. Supposedly available in Japan in August 2000 and the US next Christmas, this thing can also connect to a cell phone to do email and Web browsing. Check out Nintendo's press release here and some other info here. "

Nukelear writes "MS will be releasing a gaming console in Fall of 2000. The box will be running Intel OR AMD chips (not yet decided) and NV10 graphics. The full story is here." Note that it hasn't been confirmed yet, however. Assuming it's true, it means MS is going up against (primarily) three companies with well established brands - Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. Even if MS is MS, it still sounds like they would be up for some stiff competition...

R3 writes "Looks like Intel is trying to come up with some sort of iMac-like PC - "for home" and this is the best they could some up with is the Ottoman PC. " Here are some more pictures . The sad thing is that I think its cool. I'd like a PIII in the arm of my sofa too please.

rwest writes "The latest from news.com, an article Sun to offer Microsoft Office competitor for free. The interesting bit is about half way through, where Brian Croll, a marketing director in Sun's platforms and software group says that "In addition to giving the software away for free, Sun will make the original programming instructions, or 'source code', available under the Sun Community Source License". " This comes after yesterday's speculation about whether or not this would be open sourced.Update: 08/31 02:45 by H :NY Times also has an piece talking about the creation of Star Office as a Web app.

rwest writes "The latest from news.com, an article Sun to offer Microsoft Office competitor for free. The interesting bit is about half way through, where Brian Croll, a marketing director in Sun's platforms and software group says that "In addition to giving the software away for free, Sun will make the original programming instructions, or 'source code', available under the Sun Community Source License". " This comes after yesterday's speculation about whether or not this would be open sourced.Update: 08/31 02:45 by H :NY Times also has an piece talking about the creation of Star Office as a Web app.

An anonymous reader wrote in to send us linkage to a news.com story that says a "Key" linux site may be sold. Its actually talking about linux.org, but it also mentions Linux.com, Andover/Slashdot/Freshmeat, and contains assorted comments from Michael McLagen. Doesn't say who interested, but he does say it is "publicly traded company that buys web sites" so Earthweb and Internet.com are both reasonable guesses.

Well, it apparents that on the heels of yesterday's announcement about resigning as CEO of SGI, Belluzzo will be reportedly joining Microsoft's interactive operations units.

Bill Brooks writes "Sun and IBM announced that they are bailing out of working together on JavaOS for Business. If you've never heard of it, JavaOS for Business was a project that Sun and IBM agreed to work on together to produce a new version of an operating system that would run Java software on so-called 'thin clients.' The operating itself has only been around, in an embryonic form, since May of 1995, and the Sun/IBM joint venture started in 1997, shipping its first release in August of last year. A commercial operating system axed a year into its first release. Is M$ the only software company that can give a commercial OS time to find its market?"

Anonymous Coward writes "CNet reports that Sun has bought Star Division- the maker of StarOffice for Linux and other OSs. " Purchase price unknown, but it fits into Sun's strategy quite nicely.

KEM writes "According to this news piece, Intel is giving up on the graphics market " They are going to still make integrated chipsets, but will no longer be making discrete graphics chips. Intel chalks it up not being able to keep up with the other chip makers, despite their purchase of Chips and Technologies in 1997, which was supposed to give them that edge.

Single GNU Theory writes "HP suggests that people skip Merced in favor of McKinley. I think the reason is that HP has a bigger influence on McKinley's design than Merced's, not because the release date for Merced has been delayed past the expected release of McKinley... "

Threnody writes " Great article about Windows 2000 delay. Apparently Linux has grown from negligible in the '97 poll to 13% today. This is the latest results from IDC, the pre-eminent measuring company. They were measuring business usage. They also talk about the fact that many major organizations are not interested in rolling out Win2k right away, because of being burned before.Update: 08/19 02:08 by H :I've also been informed by a number of people that DevX is currently running a poll along much the same lines.

VFVTHUNTER writes "According to this article at cnet, MS, in an attempt to gain a share of AOL's Instant Messenger Service Market, announced today it is going to publish the protocol to its own messenger service. " It's important to note it's NOT the source code, just the protocol.

Jim Trocki writes "MCI/Worldcom's frame relay network has been hosed for at least 8 days now. Read the story. This is the recorded message that is heard on Worldcom's tech support line: 'In accordance with our plan to repair the instability in one of our frame relay network platforms, we have taken our domestic frame relay platform out of service for a 24 hour period, from noon Saturday to noon Sunday Eastern standard time. As a result, your frame relay service will not be available for traffic.' " Here is the MCI Worldcom web page on the situation. The news.com article says that this outage might cut into their profits. It seems this is quite a severe outage...

poetbill writes "Palm Computing has obtained a preliminary injunction prohibiting Royal from selling its rival DaVinci handheld device, which 3Com claims was copied from the Palm operating system." Does this remind anyone of a similar case from a few years back?

Most small company IPOs have at least a little disorganization and hype surrounding them, but Red Hat's was over the edge. We're not even going to try to sort out the claims and counter-claims, the complaints and counter-complaints, and all the rest, just point you to a selection of stories on the subject, not all of which agree 100% about exactly what happened, when it happened -- or to whom.

• Late IPO change left many red-faced at C|Net.
• Red Hat charges up 272 percent in debut from ZDNet
• Geeks Tip Their Caps to Red Hat at Wired News
• Share Price More Than Triples in Red Hat's Public Offering from the New York Times (free registration required to read)
• The Tech Investor column in the Aug. 12 Washington Post talks not only about Red Hat, but other recent IPOs. Good perspective piece.
• Red Hot (with a cute "hat" graphic) headlined Salon's take on the subject.

I found a bunch of other stories too, but they all said pretty much the same as the ones I listed above. If you spot any more good ones (or have any good stories of your own to tell), please post them below.

Most small company IPOs have at least a little disorganization and hype surrounding them, but Red Hat's was over the edge. We're not even going to try to sort out the claims and counter-claims, the complaints and counter-complaints, and all the rest, just point you to a selection of stories on the subject, not all of which agree 100% about exactly what happened, when it happened -- or to whom.

• Late IPO change left many red-faced at C|Net.
• Red Hat charges up 272 percent in debut from ZDNet
• Geeks Tip Their Caps to Red Hat at Wired News
• Share Price More Than Triples in Red Hat's Public Offering from the New York Times (free registration required to read)
• The Tech Investor column in the Aug. 12 Washington Post talks not only about Red Hat, but other recent IPOs. Good perspective piece.
• Red Hot (with a cute "hat" graphic) headlined Salon's take on the subject.

I found a bunch of other stories too, but they all said pretty much the same as the ones I listed above. If you spot any more good ones (or have any good stories of your own to tell), please post them below.

IBM will be joining the Trillian project to port Linux to Merced. The other members of Trillian are Intel, VA Linux Systems, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, and Cygnus Solutions. Linux will be shown running on a simulated Merced today at the Linuxworld conference.

IBM will be joining the Trillian project to port Linux to Merced. The other members of Trillian are Intel, VA Linux Systems, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, and Cygnus Solutions. Linux will be shown running on a simulated Merced today at the Linuxworld conference.

Larry Augustin was the subject of a recent news.com interview. Larry touches on issues like hiring important developers, the importance of linux.com, and various other things. He also mentions briefly that the IA-64 port has picked up the pace, and that VA plans to go public in the "near term rather than long term".

MikeDartt writes "According to C|Net news, Oracle is devoting an entire division to creating a line of products for Linux. As the article notes, this isn't surprising, given Ellison's antipathy towards MS. Yet another announcement for LWE, eh? " Will this lead to even more enterprise credibility?

"Cnet has a story on how businesses are starting to use Beowulf for those heavy duty tasks," writes NIB. The story notes, "Beowulf wouldn't be good for a program that executes large numbers of transactions, such as an airline reservation system. It would, however, work for business tasks such as deciding how to design an assembly line or which mix of currencies to buy, said International Data Corporation analyst Dan Kusnetzky."

redbird writes "According to this article, the FBI is temporarily (although they have a different meaning for that word) blocking satellite phones that would allow world wide wireless service because such communications are difficult to tap."

wbackous writes "C|NET's NEWS.COM has this article concerning the export of high performance PCs. The article also notes that some countries, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Brazil to be exact, were moved to the low-risk catagory." The dumb thing here is that almost anyone, almost anywhere, can put together a Beowulf network out of commodity PCs. I mean, computer export controls are obsolete, so why bother with them at all?

tweek writes "Over at news.com , you can read a story about VA Linux Systems deciding to open offices in 10 other cities. " The story also talks about great revenue growth, and the potential for an up-coming IPO.