Sega of America, saying it has privacy concerns, wants to shut down several Web sites and message boards that discuss the Dreamcast system. Sega has sent cease-and-desist letters to a group of Web sites that provide
news about what the company calls “pirated” Dreamcast games, including release information, reviews, credits and some
instructions, reports CNet.

From a ZDNet opinion: “I want to see some dust settle on this before wondering whether
Microsoft wants to use Corel as a beachhead from which to embrace Linux,
attack it, or simply overpower StarOffice. In the meantime, it appears
that I’m not the only one who looks at this deal and recalls a similar
boost that Microsoft gave, to perceived rival Apple, three years
ago.

Reuters reports that the Recording
Industry Association of America, fighting with Napster over
“unauthorized” downloading of songs on the
Internet, is forming a pool to collect
royalties from Web sites that stream
music online, according to sources.

An OpenSSH-based Secure Shell is now available in the main NetBSD sources. It will be
pulled into the netbsd-1-5 branch, so it will be available in NetBSD 1.5, reports BSD Today.

LWN.net has the advisory: “lpr has a format string security bug. It also mishandles any extension to
the lpd communication protocol, and assumes that the instructions contained
in the extension are a file it should try to print. It also has a race
condition in the handling of queue interactions that can cause the queue to
wedge.”

ABC News has a picture of Linus Torvalds along with an Associated Press story about the Congressional debate on H1-B visas.

From a commentary on 32bitsonline: “Fearing for its own existence, the once mighty Corel Corporation has finally
given in. The former software giant has gone the way of many Microsoft
ex-competitors, deciding that it’s better to strike a deal with the devil than to be
annihilated.”

From a ComputerWorld story on IBM’s launch of its first 64-bit mainframe computer: “The new servers also support a feature that allow users to carve out
virtually thousands of ‘virtual servers’ within one physical server, or
partitions within a server.

‘It means I can have gobs of Linux servers running within one partition,’
said Bill O’Donnell, a senior information technology consultant with the
state of Wisconsin in Madison.”

Slashdot readers discuss a report (in German) from newsticker www.heise.de that
SAP plans the GPL release of SAP DB, a
database based on Software AG’s Adabas.

CNN.com reports: “Both the Napster Web site and
its wildly popular song-swapping service
were inaccessible to users for several
hours Wednesday due to a hardware
problem, a company spokeswoman said.

The service went down beginning about 10:30 a.m. EDT. Since Napster is based
in Redwood City, California, the technical staff weren’t in the office because it
was so early there, the spokeswoman said.”