Slashdot gives us a nice summary of internet legislation, including the ‘American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act,’ ‘Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act,’ and others.

EETImes is reporting that the SDMI is running a contest to have people crack examples of their encryption before choosing which method will be used in SDMI approved digital music devices.

Harris Interactive, a well known firm which has many email lists, has had another settlement in its lawsuit against ISPs which blocked its mailings. “Although the Harris lawsuit listed dozens of Internet service providers (ISPs), its real target was the “black hole” list published by the Mail Abuse Prevention System, known as MAPS.“

ZDNet has survey results of a Neilsen rating of how many people have Internet access. “Of the 20 countries surveyed, the United States has the most wired households, with 136.9 million people over the age of two with Internet access at home.“

CNET covers the recent MP3.com ruling. “A federal judge ruled MP3.com willfully infringed the copyrights of Seagram’s Universal Music Group, opening the company to enormous potential damages in one of the first trials to address the legal boundaries of Internet music distribution.“

A October court date has been in the Napster case, as reported by TheStandard. “The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set the October date without comment and did not say which justices would sit on the three-member panel hearing the case, a landmark battle over copyright protection in cyberspace which could eventually touch books, movies and television.“

BSDToday has a brief piece discussing the SMP system in FreeBSD 3.x and 4.0, and how it will change in the future to accommodate better SMP expandibility. This change will remove a global kernel lock which stops SMP performance from increasing much past 2 CPUs, and improve the code by allowing the kernel to have different threads to handle interrupts.

An eBusiness story says,
“It’s critical to build trust between you and the person you’re talking to. There’s power in first-hand stories,” said Pavlicek, who has spent the last five years informing others about using open source technologies.”
-Anonymous Reader

Slashdot has a dicussion (plus a link to Linuxplanet with the original piece) detailing the design of the Nautilus, and some of the issues of making a distribution-neutral program.

ZDNet.uk article about potential market effects of RSA encyption scheme becoming public domain.