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.

From OSOpinion: “I think any business betting that Windows is the way to go is really placing a large amount of money on the roulette table of success… I personally would not take that kind of chance. I use the software that works now, and always will work. It works on new computers. It works on old computers too. And most importantly, it’s free. These are three things that will make me always prefer Linux to Windows, no matter how much Windows should improve.” –Kelly McNeill

From Ciol.com: In all the excitement and fury that surrounds the Open source movement and in no small measure Linux itself, it is often very easy to forget the origins and beginnings of this unique and often misunderstood development mechanism. Today, with Sun releasing StarOffice (renamed as OpenOffice [1]), we are often transported to a time when Netscape bravely ventured [2] where few had dared to go before – to release a commercial application into the open domain. In this three part series we look at the open source model and its history and the pros and cons that surround this development mechanism. –harry

Australian IT is reporting that departments in the Australian Government are lagging behind deadlines set out by the Prime Minister for adopting the Internet on existing budgets.