Heavy users of Freeserve are staying online
for an average of 16 hours a day, and even, weirdly, as much as
30 hours in a 24 hour period — accomplished by logging on
several PCs through a single dialup line or linking two lines
together. They’re about to be barred from the service, reports ZDCOUK.com.

Mindful of the city’s history as a place where elections have been bought, Chicago officials are trying to shut
down a Web site that offers votes to the highest bidder. From CNET.com.

The Register reports that

Microsoft is being sued by a black, female former employee who claims
race and sex discrimination. Monique Donaldson, who left the company
in May, alleges that the company’s appraisal system operates according
to the biases of its largely white male managers, rather than on merit.

Wired.com reports: With Microsoft asking for a five-month period to prepare papers for its appeal in the federal case, antitrust watchers now turn their attention to the lesser-known class-action battle in California.

Legal experts said the battle over whether techies can take apart freely distributed hardware and write separate software
applications raises interesting questions in the Digital Age, many of which are still being hashed out across the country. In some
jurisdictions, the right to reverse engineer hardware for certain purposes has been well-protected. And attempts by a company
to assert that simply using its hardware triggers a license agreement raises questions about enforceability, according to a report at SiliconValley.com.

“Every new advance leaves behind another generation
of Macs. It has been that way since the dawn of computing. Apple would go
broke if it tried to configure its new technology for every Mac built since 1984.
Even Bill Gates knows that.” From BusinessWeek.

OSOpinion: “With the announcement this week of Corel and Microsoft completing a $135 million dollar deal, it brings into question the seriousness of the commitment Corel has to Linux. The Microsoft deal is for implementation of Corel products with Visual Studio 7 (or as MS wants to call it Visual Studio.net). This is in clear conflict with the initiative started last year to market WordPerfect Office on Linux and issue a Linux Debian package under the Corel logo. This monster deal entitles Microsoft to a very large stake in Corel, 24 million non-voting shares (a whopping 24 percent of the shares), which to some may border on conspiratorial.” –Kelly McNeill

By Emmett Plant
NewsForge Columnist
Speaking of GNU/Linux

Remember 1999? In 1999, if you were having dinner with a geek, he
would have told you to call off your old tired ideology and run Linux
instead of Windows. This year, he’ll tell you to run Debian GNU/Linux
instead of Red Hat, and the reason may not be purely technical.I’m not going to play “judge the distribution” in this column. People
argue about the technical benefits of different Linux distributions
constantly, and it’s rarely beneficial. In the end, it all comes
down to personal choice. The best idea is to look at your needs, and
then choose a distribution to fill them. One of the main reasons that
geeks prefer Debian is dpkg, the Debian package manager. Another reason
is less tangible — Debian GNU/Linux is an independent Linux
distribution sponsored by Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit
organization.

That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s a lot more
important than you think. The geek culture favors decentralization and
freedom at all costs. In a world dominated by Microsoft, the Linux
community is afraid of anything that resembles actions previously made
by that Evil Company in Redmond. The problem is that people in the
mainstream view Red Hat as the One True Linux, and in their own way, Red
Hat has quietly nodded at this assumption. For example, when Red Hat
Linux 5.2 shipped into stores, it was in a pretty box, and it said
“Official Red Hat Linux 5.2” on it. Sure, you could get the impression
that Red Hat was the last word in Linux. That’s why it said “official.”
It was to lead you to believe that Red Hat was Linux. But hey,
that’s branding. That’s what it’s all about. I really don’t think that
they included the word “official” because people were dealing “bootleg”
versions of Red Hat Linux on street corners, and they wanted consumers
to know they were getting the real deal. Red Hat is the most popular
Linux distribution, and that leads to the immediate assumption that Red
Hat is out for world domination. I’m sure they are. After all, they’ve
got a responsibility to the shareholders.

Debian, on the other hand, is an independent Linux that pays lip service
to the Free Software Foundation by labeling their distribution as Debian
GNU/Linux, acknowledging the value of GNU tools for Linux. This is an
extremely good thing in the eyes of the community. Debian has garnered a
fan base by remaining loyal to the code of Linux community
ethics. The Debian Social Contract was the basis for the Open Source
Definition, after all. In addition to being Free Software enthusiasts,
the Debian developers are also a large group of cool, talented
people. Don’t be confused, though. Debian has had its problems with
corporatism, as well. Corel Linux is built on Debian. It wasn’t until
recently that Corel agreed to put the Debian logo on the Corel Linux
box. Corel and the Debian developers sat down to dinner last February,
and ironed out a lot of the wrinkles in getting a closed-source company
like Corel to understand the Linux community.

Linux is already being treated as a “catch-all” name for the Linux
kernel and GNU tools. The problem is that if you tell someone that Linux
is just the kernel, you’ll start putting people to sleep when you define
what the kernel is. At this point, if they don’t know already, they
probably don’t care. There is hope on the horizon, though. People are
getting it, and they’re learning another important lesson at the same
time. The number of different Linux distributions does not mean that
Linux is susceptible to fragmentation, it means that the ideology behind
Linux is strong enough to offer an infinite number of choices without
having to tie yourself to a distribution.

Nando AP Tech tells of China’s spaceborne goals: the Moon, and Mars.

PC World IDG reports on the latest salvos from AMD and Intel in their ongoing battle to build the fastest CPUs.