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This report has a few more Gartner pronouncements.

"SCO is being opportunistic ahead of the lawsuit with IBM by exploiting nervousness and is trying to create as much FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] as possible," said Andy Butler, research director, Gartner Group.

Butler said Gartner is not authorised to give legal advice but has advised clients that "they should not be blas and should follow events carefully if they have significant Linux exposure".

He added: "Users should not start waving their cheque books as there is no legal precedent for what SCO is demanding and it is not clear what laws have been broken."

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

Naturally, McKinsey also happens to have a long-standing and very intimate business relationship with Microsoft as consultants to their strategic planning. It should therefore be noted that Robert Uhlaner, the McKinsey executive partner who had been working as a consultant to Microsoft and who had "led the West Coast Corporate Finance & Strategy practice, supporting the firm's technology clients on strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), alliances, and premerger planning", was given a top executive position at Microsoft in February 2003, in which his aim is to "increase strategic alignment between the Microsoft's finance and business groups". That pretty well sums up what happened to Corel between the Microsoft investment and disinvestment, in just 2½ years! Questions arise as to what involvement Mr. Uhlaner had, officially or unofficially, with the Microsoft-supportive strategic advice given to Corel in late 2000 and early 2001, or with Vector's friendly and private purchasing of the Corel shares Microsoft held, which happened almost immediately after his arrival to Microsoft.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx t

Deep linking illegal under EU law, By Andy McCue, Computing [26-01-2001]

Danish Court Rules Deep Linking Illegal

Some examples of companies who forbid deep linking (the last link is full of stupid examples, some websites which would get a great benefit for their popularity from deep linking

"This new processor will give users 16 hours of battery life..."

Hmm... where have I heard this before? Oh yeah... Transmeta.

It will be great if the handheld lives up to its hype... but I'll be waiting for benchmarks of a released product before I believe it.

The code in contention is Unix System V.

Is that a fact?.

I suppose someone ought to tell the guys at SCO that, because they seem blissfully unaware.

Apart from software piracy?

Quoting McBride from here, "So we really are in unprecedented waters. It will be interesting to see how it plays out." Swami sez the way it will 'play out' will only be the slow agonizing death of McSCO...good riddance McSCO.

Corel shareholders fight suspicious takeover deal

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx to merge their technologies into the project codenamed Deepwhite. Great idea but with somewhat misguided execution.

In 2002 Corel managed to strike a few high-profile albeit limited OEM preload deals with the likes of Dell, HP and Sony. While Corel received little in terms of revenue from those deals, even that limited success must have come as a shock for Microsoft. "How dare those ingrate nobodies invade our holy turf!" could have been the likely reaction at Redmond. With the anti-trust spotlight under a friendly operator it was time for the final strike, and how better add insult to injury than by not just taking Corel out but actually keeping the corpse within the family!

In December 2002 the Paul Allen financed Vector Group, managed by a fo

Part 1 and Part 2 of 3 part interview with McBride

Part 1 and Part 2 of 3 part interview with McBride

SCO is now claiming they have the right to audit AIX customers here. I believe the proper response to the arrival of SCO auditors is the response to salesmen shown in this trailer for Secondhand Lions

I actually thought the other SCO news today was more interesting: SCO may audit IBM AIX customers.

How do SCO want to use the discovery process> Darl said: "We get to really shake things up". I don't know what was in Darl's mind when he said that, but I assumed (I'm not a lawyer though!) that discovery was supposed to be about collecting evidence not shaking up IBM's customers. I'm also unclear (the sentence doesn't parse) what Darl means by using discovery as a "vehicle" - again I thought discovery was supposed to be about collecting evidence prior to the case, not used for some other purpose. Anybody care to comment??

There are also some more Darl (longer quotes in more context) on the same subject here.

There's an article on vnunet that hints at what is really going on. It's sleazier than most have even imagined. When IBM, SCO and Sequent got together for project Monteray, the Sequent code for RCU, NUMA and other scalability enhancements were integrated in to the SysV OS they were building. While Sequent, and later IBM, owned their own code, SCO owned the rights to determine its continued usage. This is a result of the rather odious old ATT license agreements.

So, what SCO is claiming isn't that Linux has code taken from anything SCO ever created. They are claiming that Linux has code that was created by Sequent (now owned by IBM) and IBM and that the Unix licensing agreements give SCO rights over that code. SCO is suing IBM for giving away its own code because a goofy licensing agreement says they can.

Microsoft brought IE to mac to gain leverage during the browser wars - also helped them with a few of their antitruse issues.

This being said - I think that Microsoft put good amount of development into IE for mac - still a piece of crap - but they tried. They knew that mac users would not put up with mickey mouse BS like IE for windows. They should add some of the features from their mac browser to IE on windows.

Omniweb (Webcore), Camino, Mozilla, and Firebird are, and have been for some time, the most competitive mac browsers. (left IE in the dust a long time ago) To imply that Safari is the undisputed king is nieve. I actually think that Omniweb 5.0 is going to shake things up a good amount when it arives ( Omnigroup has a lot of former neXtstep people).

Microsoft is pulling IE because it does not fit into their Palladium/DRM strategy. I am sure there will be no tears shed over this one - they can have both Pallidium and IE - need to keep those 'features' for the Windows users. ;-)

Microsoft brought IE to mac to gain leverage during the browser wars - also helped them with a few of their antitruse issues.

This being said - I think that Microsoft put good amount of development into IE for mac - still a piece of crap - but they tried. They knew that mac users would not put up with mickey mouse BS like IE for windows. They should add some of the features from their mac browser to IE on windows.

"And perhaps now they realize that their garbage code is to difficult and time consuming to fix to compete in an arena that never had competition before (before safari came)."

No competition before safari? Ever hear of Omniweb, Camino, iCab, Mozilla, Opera? These browsers (espically Camino and Mozilla Firebird) are pretty much neck and neck with safari.

Microsoft is pulling IE because it does not fit into their Palladium/DRM schema. I am sure there will be no tears shed over this one - they can take both pallidium and IE - they need to keep those 'features' for the Windows users. ;-)

I'd like to see a timeline.

I found a November 2002 article talking about SCO, high end computing work that they had done with Compaq in the clustering arena and a brief touch on LKP.

I found a February 2001 article just about Linux and SCO integration and LKP.

I found a 2002 SCO Newsletter touting LKP.

I also found Simon Baldwin's resume who has a long history at SCO and who was the "Lead Kernel Engineer and Architect for the Linux Kernel Personality (LKP)" from February of 2000 to "present".

So the LKP stuff was going on quite some time ago. Before or after IBM allegedly put the offending into Linux? Inquiring minds want to know.

... to reply to mi2g claims that Linux is more hacked than Windows. Now you have hundreds of windows computers in your near vicinity waiting to be hacked thru port 1080. I think that at the rate of infection of this last worm, in very few days (sunday?) will be the most widely distributed computer worm ever.

Did you know that MS has been poking around the UK for mobile-phone related companies?
Last century, MS bought STNC which makes mobile phone software (web-browser, tcp/ip stack...)
Here's a dusty article ... Microsoft acquires Symbian partner STNC
-- jpa
PS: I actually helped those guys debug their tcp stack... and what a piece of crap.

http://www.vnunet.com/Analysis/1140828

It makes no sense to duplicate our efforts in research and development.
Ransom Love vnunet interview

if you combine the assets of the United-Linux members, we are the biggest Linux vendor
Darl Mcbride eweek

You might also like to consider that there is a huge difference between registering the types and reason for data, and the actual data being stored. Also, you do not have access to a database listing every company that holds information about you (and, if you did, its existence would be worrying). It is up to you to identify possible data holders and contact them.

I am not knocking Richard Thomas, but both he and his predecessor have a thankless task.

It appears that SCO's claims about Linux scalability, etc, may have been as a result of some IBM PR in 2000.

A vunet article from June 2000 quotes Miles Barel, IBM's program director for AIX and Monterey, as saying that scalability, volume and systems management features present in IBM's Unix operating system, AIX, are still missing from Linux.

Of course, an IBM'er would (at that moment in time) push AIX over the (then) hobby project called Linux. But, it seems that it is this comment that's sparked SCO's much delayed attack.

"Scornful members of the Linux community are signing an online petition to 'highlight the pomposity' of SCO's claim to ownership of intellectual property in Linux."

"The creator of an online petition is inviting users to sign up to challenge SCO to sue them..."

Article at vnunet.

Petition at petitiononline.com

Looks like it's better to ask forgiveness than seek permission.

According to VNU.net, SCO has suspended support of United Linux.

There really does seem to be no difference between someone who cannot read and someone who does not. Those that can read wouldn't be caught using MS-Passport. Sadly, signal can be drowned out by noise coming from a colossal marketing blitz to last through september.

We'll see if they last that long. Windows2003 seems to be more of a push to get users over to OS X or Linux. Their other (2nd of 2) cash cow, the new MS-Office has already been postponed and seems to be more of an incentive to move to OpenOffice than to upgrade.

The two previous postings in this thread both make excellent points. In common with both is the insight that security has to be addressed foremost in terms of design principles. The first posting discussed the principle of verifiability (the system keeps its word.) The second posting discussed consistency with respect to the requirements set by security policy.

It's not very productive to try to reason about the security of a system if we can't be certain how it was built, yet typically sites cannot say with certainty whether or not any of their hosts match a given definition of how they were to have been configured[1]. Similarly, the correspondence between policy and practice is ultimately a product of human effort, so that even with a clear and meaningful site policy in place, its effectiveness will tend to be adversely influenced by human factors [2]. Unfortunately it seems from some studies that only a very small minority of sites have developed security policies at all [3].

It's common for people at the outset to discuss security in terms of promoting a shopping list of specific security elements and practices. Indeed, it's probably appropriate to encourage junior staff to take responsibility at this level of security awareness. At the same time, it would be misguided to act as if this degree of analysis were sufficient. Doing so will deliver an environment consisting of some ad hoc combination of "steel doors and paper walls."

Security is an emergent property of the complete architecture of a site. You have to allow this thinking to influence every design decision, which is a pretty challenging requirement even for a senior system architect. To support that process, I think it's an extremely important perspective for us all to cultivate, to the degree that it makes sense within our own areas of specialization.

As far as I can determine, the most economical way to do that is to concentrate foremost on understanding and following reasonable security principles when building systems. It seems evident that this is not yet being done, even though there is good consensus, at elast among security experts, on what would be most useful to do.

[1] R. Evard, "An Analysis of UNIX System Configuration," Proc. LISA 1997 (Oct 1997)

[2] A. Whitten, "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0", USENIX Security Symposium 1999 (Aug 1999)

[3] J. Harker, "Developing a security policy," vnunet (Jan 2003)

I'm also quite interested in this, hope he answers your question. Actually, now that I think about *activate google powers*: first search result for h.264 is this @ :

By any name, the codec, scheduled for completion in spring 2003, is a product of the Joint Video Team (JVT) of the International Telecommunication Union and International Standards Organization. And it's already making waves.

Ok, that doesn't tell me much, but a search for h.264 and royalties brings this up :

One of the initial goals of the H.264 project was that the so-called "baseline" codec should be free of problems with patents. It should be possible to build products using the technology without having to pay royalties. I originally laughed at this idea and talked about flying pigs, but it appears that the aim has come true; the baseline codec uses technology that is either not patented or the patent holders have waived their rights to royalties.

I likes me the sound of that.

Tools for a distributed cracker are here

Slashdot's reference is here

The card was about 5 years ago, and may not be on-line, turned out there was a bug that returned the same limited set of codes.

As for cards locking after 3 attempts, you can always unlock them (done all the time with looped ppv cards) or stop after 2 atttempts. Besides, many systems actually store the PIN (or a portion of it) on the card.

Keep in mind that you don't have to crack every 1024-bit message, just a few of them, to give you access to enough information to go after the rest.

Go suck a sausage Aaron, no one will ever forgive you, EVER.

In case any of you missed it, ardiri up there was the author of the only Palm virus (thats right, he was the only one to sink that low).

He would hang out in the Palm channels on EfNet and give it out to people looking for cracks to his software. Yet somehow he decided that none of these people would ever give it out to anyone else? Of course, he told the media a different story, that he only gave to it friends, but even the media put "'s around the word friends.

Here's a link to an article tho many more can still be foud on google

You could equate this to being proof of concept and that he was trying to show vulnerability, but this is obviously not the case. Its not like he sent it to Palm or any anti-virus companies before giving it out. He didn't do it for the good of users, he did it because he couldn't figure out a scheme to stop people from cracking his software and though he'd teach them a lesson. In fact, if any of you attended the Defcon 8 Palm security talk, the presenter gave a rather nice break down of the protection scheme.

• http://www.vnunet.com/News/1140296
  
• http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/17/10501 72679775.html
  

True, it might not be an inherent flaw in USB itself (although the way it shares bandwidth, as opposed to how something like firewire works, also bugs me) but if no vendor can write good drivers for it, what's the difference?

1 more story: I used to have an AST Century City--nice little legacy-free PIII/500, USB-only, 6"x9"x12". Neat little unit. (pic) USB only. I could turn it on with a USB keyboard in, get into the BIOS, and navigate around. OK, so the BIOS sees the KB, shouldn't be any problem, right? Wrong. Let it boot into various OSs (including some Linuxes) and poof! no keyboard.

More about IBM and Cern- Gridcomputingplanet

More about Cern-Hepwww
The Large Electron Positron Collider at Cern-Hepwww

Windows XP Service Pack 1 causes memory management problems that my experience shows are far, far worse than Microsoft says. The new 815411 patch seems to fix the problems on the one system on which I have tested it. The title is "Programs Run Slower After You Install Windows XP SP-1", but that doesn't make sense. Why do they run slower? Because the operating system is trying to recover from memory management errors?

To see the problem, start 20 instances of Mozilla, each with 10 tabs. As you are doing this, you will find that the responsiveness of the Windows XP system becomes much slower. Then, when the limit of installed memory is reached, and the system begins using virtual memory, all instances of Mozilla will crash. After the crashes, the Windows XP system remains unstable. The instability can only be fixed by re-booting.

See the Slashdot article: XP Service Pack Slows Programs

The Slashdot article referenced this article: Service Pack glitch causes system slowdowns (Notice the nonsense subtitle in this article: "Windows XP SP1 update flaw affects memory-allocating programs".)

Microsoft is apparently afraid that the patch causes more problems, so the patch has limited availability. Also, by making people who want the patch call Microsoft, the company may be collecting information about the problems people are having. It seems from the way the notice of the patch is worded that if you call Microsoft, you may have to pay.

I downloaded the patch from other sources, and found that they all were the same, so that relieved worries of a bad patch.

Sources:

Neowin

Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

http://www.paricom.com/matt/xphotfix/

Actually this is a great idea. I mean, the VAIO thing seems unlikely. There is also a media center PC with minidisc, but it retails at 2999, so I won't even bother providing a link.

However, I have a friend that just bought a Sony MiniDisc/MP3 player from Best Buy. Incidentally, it was $129, less than half the price listed here. I am not entirely sure it was the same model, but I think it is. I have no reason for the price discrepancy.

In any case, if you were not set on the medium (optical vs. minidisc), this might suit your purposes. You could disassemble this and make it smaller, though it is pretty damn small as it is. You were unclear in your post whether your desire is just to prove that you can hack an MP3 player together, or whether you were trying to save money, but $129 is pretty darn cheap. If it is missing the features you want, you could buy this and hack those in. A bigger LCD would be nice. Also, there is this, a computer MiniDisc drive. It might help you with construction/experimentation, or even using this device in your ultimate invention.

The cons as I see them are that you are tied down to a proprietary, closed-source medium. It is relatively popular, but not ubiquitous (like CDR).

The pros: it's cheap. It's easy. It's small.

Good Luck. -Foster

Although you'll also see articles like this out there.

I thought the "Red Flags for RedHat" article was actually pretty good--after all, investors are cautious now, and for good reason; also, Linux distributions haven't been making money, especially when compared to sales of other server operating systems, and a lot of people are looking at the bottom line now, after getting burned.

So, yeah, RedHat is a great company with a solid product... but always, always do your research first. I think that's a very responsible position to take. If you believe in RedHat, buy some stock--but don't bet the farm on it, especially if you might need that farm someday.

--was just reading an article on this very subject.

A big investment bank sorta disagrees, at least on the linux aspect addressed here.

Whereas, just a few days early, in European Commission eyes Linux (31-10-2002), Netproject director Eddie Bleasdale claims, "the debate had moved beyond whether to use open source as the cost of ownership benefits were well understood."

What do you think? Is this true? Is Microsoft still fighting yesterday's battles? Has Linux really already won the TCO argument?

It'd be nice to see a domino effect: Banking, then insurance, then retail, then ... consumer's desktops.

Speaking of domino effects, can anyone shed more light on this quote from The rise and rise of the Linux empire (10-09-2002)?

It looks as though the battle for the server market is being won by Linux. It was reported recently that most Wall Street trading operations are converting to the open source operating system.

This may not sound important but, for those like me who keep an eye on the markets, it is relevant. Some IT market sectors are strong technology validators and lead the way in adoption. Wall Street traders make up such a sector.

Was any such thing actually reported, and where can more details be found? And are Wall Street traders really such a bellweather of technology trends as the author claims?

Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC

Whereas, just a few days early, in European Commission eyes Linux (31-10-2002), Netproject director Eddie Bleasdale claims, "the debate had moved beyond whether to use open source as the cost of ownership benefits were well understood."

What do you think? Is this true? Is Microsoft still fighting yesterday's battles? Has Linux really already won the TCO argument?

It'd be nice to see a domino effect: Banking, then insurance, then retail, then ... consumer's desktops.

Speaking of domino effects, can anyone shed more light on this quote from The rise and rise of the Linux empire (10-09-2002)?

It looks as though the battle for the server market is being won by Linux. It was reported recently that most Wall Street trading operations are converting to the open source operating system.

This may not sound important but, for those like me who keep an eye on the markets, it is relevant. Some IT market sectors are strong technology validators and lead the way in adoption. Wall Street traders make up such a sector.

Was any such thing actually reported, and where can more details be found? And are Wall Street traders really such a bellweather of technology trends as the author claims?

Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC

Whereas, just a few days early, in European Commission eyes Linux (31-10-2002), Netproject director Eddie Bleasdale claims, "the debate had moved beyond whether to use open source as the cost of ownership benefits were well understood."

What do you think? Is this true? Is Microsoft still fighting yesterday's battles? Has Linux really already won the TCO argument?

It'd be nice to see a domino effect: Banking, then insurance, then retail, then ... consumer's desktops.

Speaking of domino effects, can anyone shed more light on this quote from The rise and rise of the Linux empire (10-09-2002)?

It looks as though the battle for the server market is being won by Linux. It was reported recently that most Wall Street trading operations are converting to the open source operating system.

This may not sound important but, for those like me who keep an eye on the markets, it is relevant. Some IT market sectors are strong technology validators and lead the way in adoption. Wall Street traders make up such a sector.

Was any such thing actually reported, and where can more details be found? And are Wall Street traders really such a bellweather of technology trends as the author claims?

Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC

refurbishment!

Why should I believe this are not faked like they rest?

Because an ISO of the alpha has been leaked as well and a spokeswoman of Microsoft has commented the issue.

Visit #Betas @ irc.betasonline.com for more information. Also see xbetas.com. This is the .nfo.

Also, here's a guide to fix certain boot problems with Longhorn.

That didn't work so well the last time they tried it...

• BMI Declare that all their future music CDs will be copy protected
• While EMI Germany do likewise, they also insult the complainant. (I'm informed it is even harsher than the translation)
• And soon you won't be able to return the CD if it doesn't work (UK)
• And beware of innovations (this article, beat you to it slashdot - nyah nyah!), as they may be slipping DRM in the back door
• Web radio was getting very popular, everyone was getting in on the act. Not any more. Only the big radio stations still broadcast.
• Microsoft joined the party with their "Trusted Computing" initiative, meaning *you* can trust MS software, Which in reality is a DRM thing (MS software can't trust you)
• Oh, and extending copyright. Courts admit that it can't be extended indefinately, but how long is a piece of string?

• Reuters sued for linking to a URL
• They haven't been the first to be sued for deeplinking. Check out This particularly fine example.
• How a single sniper is more dangerous than all the world's hackers combined

• Getting sued for silence
• Thanks to the CBDTPA, nearly everything *must* embed DRM. This includes cockpit voice recorders, digital speed cameras, hearing aids, and big mouth billy bass
• Even phoning a friend can breach copyright, 2 musicians copyright 100,000 phone numbers (dial tones).

• A review of the technologies shows that it is futile to protect CDs, (based on the assumption that new devices will more likely circumvent protection rather than enforce it)
• Richard Stallman (Free Software advocate) jumps in with a cautionary tale
• And a felt tip pen can bypass some protections

True, because as we all know, leaving the computer to goto the bathroom is the cause of pre-mature death of computer geeks!

San Jose police have broken up an alleged identity theft crime ring using search warrants to seize and examine the suspects' PDAs.

According to the New York Times the alleged ringleader had the names of more than 20 victims along with their social security, bank account and credit card numbers and other personal information stored on his Sony Clie handheld device.

Included in the To Do list were tasks such as picking up materials at the local office supply store to make fake cheques.

A police spokesman said that it was difficult for the suspect to deny that the Clie was his, as it had his parents' details stored in it under the name 'Mom and Dad'.

I have news for you. Microsoft doesn't give a crap about Linux or OS software and whatever insignificant market share they have.

Ballmer: Linux Is Top Threat To Windows

Microsoft acknowledges Linux threat

Ballmer: Microsoft sees the Linux challenge

You mention that "lots of big companies" are starting to deply Linux to the business desktop. Name a few.

Wall Street Embraces Linux

Linux for the Rest of Us

DreamWorks switches to HP, Linux

Secure Linux desktop begins shipping to UK police force

Looks similar to the Grid Computing project from India, announced sometime back ...

I hope they get run out of business (or AOL/TW buys them--which is the same thing, isn't it?) Rumor about a merger is here

Someone should also do something about their pedophile infested dot-com division!

No, RMS, Linux is not GNU/Linux

"One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS -- more on this later). He named it 'Linux' with a little help from his friends. Why doesn't he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff -- including the software I wrote using GCC -- and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don't want to be known as a nag, do you?"

LINUX use is growing 30% / year!

"Linux use is growing 30 per cent year-on-year and while it hasn't been targeted as much, Linux is going to be targeted. Any application - open source or otherwise - will have weaknesses," he added.

...AND SLASHDOT published astronomy shit on frontpage... not these NEWS!