The Associated Press reports that Four Republicans are promoting legislation that would
force schools and libraries to use Internet filtering software or lose federal
dollars intended to help buy Web access.

More than 80 percent of Americans doubt the U.S. government’s ability to maintain
computer security and privacy, according to a poll released
Monday as reported by Reuters. Eighty-one percent of Americans were either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” that government-held data about them may be
misused some day, according to the survey conducted for the
Information Technology Association of America, a
trade group. Another 72 percent said they would not feel
safe signing a contract over the Internet using a “secure
digital signature.”

Attachmate Corporation has announced the release of Attachmate e-Vantage Host Access Server 2.3, the latest version of Attachmate’s Web-based host access management solution. Attachmate e-Vantage Host Access Server 2.3 introduces management console support on IBM’s OS/390 mainframe and AS/400 host platforms, in addition to server platform support on Sun Solaris HP/UX, AIX, and LINUX operating systems. It is an easy-to-deploy, secure solution that enables enterprises to extend access to existing host applications to any Web browser. — Submitted by BHZ

From LinuxProgramming.com: “Watching the recent food fight over Red Hat’s 7.0 release brings to mind something
that very few people in our industry, especially programmers, seem to remember:
Learning from our own mistakes is always a good thing, but learning from the
mistakes of others is even better. After all, if we’re open-minded enough we can
still get the benefit of the lesson without having to endure the
pain/embarrassment/inconvenience/whatever of making the error. Think of it as
open source learning.”

For all you systems administrators out there, and the people who love them, Linux.com serves up a feature on Unix password management.

Founded by a group of GNU/Linux enthusiasts, MLX s.r.l. has set from the
very start an ambitious project: become a reference point for Linux and Open
Source technologies in Italy. The press release is at Linux PR.

Sun Microsystems has released the source code for its StarOffice, but the Web-based StarPortal version of the software is still delayed, InfoWorld reports. Linux PR has the press release about the code release.

NewsForge was down for about 12 hours Monday because of a faulty power supply on our main server, but returned about 6 p.m.

The server, which had been rebooting randomly late Sunday, refused to boot up about 6 a.m. Monday, said Jamie McCarthy, head programmer at NewsForge. “It was stuck on fsck, waiting for someone at the console
to tell it what to do,” he said.

Server administrators pressed a quad-Xeon 550 into service, and McCarthy spent most of the day copying files over and configuring it — a complete Slashcode installation.

McCarthy wasn’t sure NewsForge needed the power and size of a Type III server, but it does have multiple backup power supplies. “But it turned out that it helped us again already,” he said. “Around 3 p.m., we had a hell of a scare when one of the hard drives apparently flaked out. But since it’s parity RAID, and since the others are working fine, nothing was corrupted.”

NewsForge began posting news again shortly after 6 p.m. Monday, and our service should be back to normal. We’ll try to catch up on all the Open Source news that happened while we were down.

As always, we welcome readers’ input on everything we do at NewsForge. We apologize for the down time Monday.

— Grant Gross, managing editor
grant@newsforge.com

The Secure Digital Music Initiative may not have been hacked yet after all, reports 32bitsonline. “A report in Web ‘zine Salon last week quoted Secure Digital Music
Initiative (SDMI) insiders as saying that all six technologies were
successfully mastered after the organization issued a public
challenge to code-breakers last month. However, the SDMI is saying
this week that it is not yet sure whether challenge participants, who
were competing for $10,000 prizes offered for each technology, have
actually defeated the six methods.”

From a column at LinuxPlanet: “I’m of the opinion that while code forking in and of itself isn’t necessarily a
bad thing, it can lead to a lot of wasted effort (time that could be spent
developing ends up being wasted through postings to nasty flame wars in
discussion groups) and at worst cripple essential projects. I think we can
all agree that embedded Linux is A Good Thing and doesn’t represent a
threat to the main Linux kernel: no one is going to grab a version of
embedded Linux from MontaVista or TimeSys and expect to run it on their
PC. While I’m not entirely sure anymore that embedded Linux represents
the future of Linux, the forking of Linux in the embedded world certainly
doesn’t bother me.”