MSNBC reports, European Union nations, and perhaps even the
United States, are about to make nearly any form
of cracking — even security research — illegal
by treaty.

From UpsideToday: Not since the rancorous Open BSD/Net BSD split in 1994 had the community witnessed a
breakup — or “fork,” in developer parlance — of this magnitude. While members of both the
Samba-TNG — an offshoot of the Samba group that develops for the latest versions of
Windows NT and Windows 2000 — and the main Samba teams did their best to put a happy
face on this affair, there was no hiding the concern, even among those closest to split.

The difference between the American and European hacking
worlds will be a hot topic this week in Amsterdam, as the first
international version of Def Con, the annual hacking convention in
Las Vegas, gets underway. From ZDCOUK.

ZDNET reports that The Federal Trade Commission is currently hosting a two-day
workshop to look at how victims restore their good names with
the US’s three national consumer reporting agencies — Equifax,
Experian, and Trans Union — and other bureaucracies.

From Wired.com: Deja.com is about to sell its Usenet archive — six years of Internet communications chiseled into digital stone. The pending change of owner raises the question: Is there a future for the Internet’s oral history?

I’ve been using “traditional” languages like Perl, Python and C to get my work done, and done very
well, for ages. Now suddenly I have these new kids on the block and some management
consultants who would not know their backside from a line of C code, who curl up their lips and
sneer, “Perl” You got to be kidding! I mean how can you write mission critical stuff in Perl? After
all, Perl does not have enterprise features and functionality and all things expected for developing
high-end Internet applications. Perl does not have platform independence, or multithreading and
suffers from significant speed issues.
Full Story at:-
India CNET-Anonymous Reader

In Germany, where an AOL spokesman says citizens like “to have a law on everything,” legislators are expected to restrict employers’ ability to monitor their workers’ e-mails. From Wired.com.

The Register reports that three serious IT publications have run benchmarks for
Sony’s new Crusoe laptop in the past week, published them… and
disavowed the results immediately.

You wouldn’t think that gadgets meant to keep CPUs cool would be likely to
qualify as art objects. Well, not unless you’d seen this little lot, anyway. From AustralianIT.com.

“Can we please get over our collective forkaphobia? Every few weeks something happens in the Linux
landscape, such as the recent news that the Samba project is undergoing a planned fork, or some
pseudo-technical pseudo-journalist decides to take a shot at Linux by dragging this old red herring into the
conversation, and we have to endure yet another round of angst and debate over whether Linux will
smithereen itself all over the landscape. It’s pointless, and it’s lost whatever entertainment value it had a long
time ago.” LinuxProgramming.com has this editorial.