Scour, an online multimedia company backed by Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz, said a pending lawsuit filed against it by the film and music industries has scared off potential investors and caused it to lay off 52 of its 70 employees. Scour said that investors with whom it was working to provide the company’s next round of financing had decided not to move forward as of late last week due to concerns about a July 20 lawsuit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) against the company over copyright infringement. The story is at The Standard

From a story at Fairfax IT: “Changes to Australia’s copyright laws, the first significant amendments since the 1960s, could be used in the Australian courts by offshoots of United States entertainment companies seeking to clamp down on illegal de-scrambling of copyright-protection software.”

Amazon’s dubious patent activities came back to haunt the company last week at the Paris launch of amazon.fr. Amazon had pushed the boat(s) out for the occasion, inviting 4,000 guests to a party on the Seine, but was faced by a small clutch of demonstrators from campaigning groups APRIL and AFUL, handing out leaflets and “free cookies, not patented by Amazon,” reports The Register.

From Alan Cox: “Linux 2.2.17 official is now out. This is the same as 2.2.17pre20 without
the -pre20 id string. This is the version waiting Linus.” The announcement is at LWN.net.

Tired of the sendmail’s cryptic configuration, or do you find yourself complaining about its speed? Well then, postfix could be the MTA for you. The Postfix website defines postfix as a MTA which “attempts to provide an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program.” If it’s speed and security you’re looking for, Postfix is a very nominal choice for a MTA. According to the project’s web site, Postfix is up to three times faster than its closest competitor, boasting the capability to send up to 1,000,000 different messages in a day. The story is at BSD Today.

The following message was just send out over BUGTRAQ. In it Ivan Arce
of CODE SDI discloses a security vulnerability that affects almost all
UNIX systems, including Linux. The vulnerability can normally only be exploited locally, but there are
some instances where it may be possible to exploit it remotely via
TELNET. The problem is the result of a new class of vulnerabilities
that were discussed on BUGTRAQ during the last few months. This
type of vulnerabilities are being termed “format string” vulnerabilities. The advisory is at LWN.net.

America Online must make a formal promise to provide open access to its high-speed cable lines, or the Federal Trade Commission will seek to block the company’s merger with Time Warner, the Washington Post is reporting in its Monday edition. One version of the story is at Inter@ctive Week.

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), responds to the recent flaw discovered in Network Associates implementation of the Additional Decryption Key feature. This is a key escrow account that allows a responsible third-party to gain access to encrypted messages when the original key is lost. The story is at Network World Fusion

A Slashdot discussion examines the differences between Linux and Windows 2000.

IBM has unveiled a range of super-fast, high-capacity tape drives – using a new open standard. Big Blue is the first to adopt LTO (Linear Tape-Open) Ultrium technology, developed by a consortium involving IBM and its bitter storage rivals, Seagate and Hewlett-Packard.
IBM said the main market was Unix, NT and mid-range alternatives. IBM’s AS400 and RS6000, and various Unix flavours from HP and Sun were also supported, and Linux would be accommodated soon. The story is at Austrialian IT.