PCWorld tells us: The latest virus definition update for Network Associates’ McAfee VirusScan can freeze computer systems, Network Associates has confirmed.

A Palestinian group is waging an online battle against AT&T for repairing the website of the Israeli
parliament, urging its subscribers to cancel their services, Wired.com reports.

From OSOpinion.com: “The tyrant of technology uses government-guaranteed technological secrets to include or
exclude people, companies, even churches and other social institutions. Nobody owns numbers,
nobody owns letters, and nobody owns the laws of physics or the rules of mathematics. But
tyrants can own protocols, they can own file formats, they can own interfaces, they can own
filters. The virtual tyrants both now and in the future can control by using the laws they create,
even if they can no longer leverage their strength to control by means of natural law.”

“Here at the Microsoft Security Response Center, we investigate thousands of security reports
every year. In some cases, we find that a report describes a bona fide security vulnerability
resulting from a flaw in one of our products; when this happens, we develop a patch as quickly as
possible to correct the error. In other
cases, the reported problems simply result from a mistake someone made in using the product.”

Like the Star Trek captain he is so fond of, Richard F. Rashid, senior vice president of
Microsoft Corp.’s Research Group, leads the Redmond, Wash.-based company’s
voyages into uncharted territory. He took the helm earlier this year after the departure of
chief technologist Nathan Myrvold, who had hired Rashid from Carnegie Mellon
University in 1991 to create the research division. Rashid now directs a staff of more than
600 researchers in four labs in the United States, China and England. He recently spoke
with Silicon Valley News Seattle Bureau Chief Kristi Heim.

SecurityFocus: There are many reasons for a villain to crack Microsoft’s network… industrial espionage just isn’t one of them. Mitnick on Microsoft.

“The future for telcos has shifted from voice communications to data communications, including wireless services and the Net,” says an Industry Standard story picked up by IDG. The story also says, “Now it’s hardly news that telecom companies see the Net as a
big opportunity. But it’s hard to overstate the significance of
the shift from voice communications to data communications
as the primary driver of the business. It was only in 1998 that
data communications surpassed voice communications as the
largest consumer of telecommunications capacity….”

Quote: “This week, probably Tuesday, Transmeta will go public, attempting to raise as much as $234 million by selling 13 million
shares at $16 to $18 each in an initial public offering. Will investors scoop up Transmeta’s shares in a buying frenzy, or
will they leave the stock stranded, like the fictional sailor Robinson Crusoe, for whom the company’s flagship chip is
named?” The story gives a general overview of Transmeta, what the company has been up to, and how it might fit into the overall chipmaker scheme of things after its IPO. Read it at mercurycenter.com

For POSIX systems, Printing is in the same state that graphics were ten or fifteen years ago. There is no standard, save for the underpowered LPR protocol and utilities. Many have tried to replace LPR, with mixed success. Gnulpr is a project to finally develop a printing system for GNU that graduates us out of LPR into a more advanced, modular architecture. –Nick Moffitt

By Grant Gross

Managing Editor

A popular game in the Open Source community seems to be guessing what company will Open Source what application. This week, Sun and its Java project were targets of the game. ZD Net reported that the company is slowly “loosening its grip” on Java by tweaking its Java Community Process 2.0 to allow partners more say in its development.

Meanwhile, NewsForge news editor Tina Gasperson examines the reason Sun isn’t moving forward with plans to Open Source Java, at least not yet. One Sun spokesperson says the company isn’t comfortable with the GPL. And LinuxWorld made the case that an Open-Sourced Java would undermine the supremacy of Windows.

The biggest thing since Godzilla

Another company having a large impact on Open Source issues these days is IBM, which sold more than 15,000 computers running Linux to Lawson, a Japanese convenience store chain. The sale was reported to be the “biggest ever commercial use of Linux.”

In other IBM news, the tech giant announced that it is releasing a small-business suite of programs for Linux, including DB2 Universal Database, WebSphere Application server, and Lotus Domino.

We’ve maybe heard this before, but promises of the 2.4 version of Linux appear to be real, as its beta version was released on Halloween, the same day as Microsoft’s Whistler beta. Linux godfather Linus Torvalds said there are no “showstopper bugs” in the 2.4.0 test10-final version, and that the final 2.4 kernal could be released in the coming month.

A quiet revolt

A group of IT professionals in Italy planned to deliver an open letter to the Italian government, calling for an end to the “excessive dependence” on Microsoft. The letter, signed by about 1,000 Italian IT workers, called for the government to use more Open Source products.

In perhaps the oddest news of the week, Hasbro Inc. has released a dot-com version of its famed Monopoly game, with Linux as one of the utilities, and sites such as Yahoo! and Monster on the board. Funny, but Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a space on the board.

New in NewsForge

Freelance writer Eric Ries interviews Free Software movement founder Richard M. Stallman about the upcoming version of the GNU General Public License. Among other things, RMS is working on making the GPL more business friendly.

Columnist Jack Bryar compares an attempt by many companies to work the words “Open Source” into their business plans to the watered down Half-Way Covenant the Puritans made with early American settlers.

Columnist Julie Bresnick profiles Marcel Gagne, writer of the column, Cooking with Linux, and an amateur astronomer.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.