A former Intel engineer is facing charges of insider trading. ZDNet has more.

SFPress contemplates the future of the virus as more and more technologies become based on shared data.

A report by Eric Murray was released this week based on the results of a random sample of over 8000 secure web servers. Surprisingly, only two thirds of sites surveyed were found to have adequate (“strong”) encryption. Eric defined strong sites as those that support TLS v1 or SSL v3, support 128 bit ciphers, and have valid non-expired third-party certificates, reports Apache Week.

Embedded Linux developer Lineo Inc. has released for beta testing RTnet, a modification to the Linux networking subsystem that permits embedded devices to communicate in hard real time using Internet protocols over Ethernet. According to the company, this represents the first time that such communications have been possible using nonproprietary operating systems. The story is at SDTimes.

Slashdot readers discuss cease-and desist-orders apparently sent to several people who have written Linux drivers and apps relating to a free barcode scanner.

From a Wired.com story about chatbot Biz: “Biz is based on Jason Hutchens’ MegaHal, the 1998 runner-up in the Loebner Prize, a version of the Turing Test that every year attempts to find the most convincingly “human,” chattering robot. Hutchens said that since he released MegaHal under the GNU public license, it has been downloaded thousands of times. It is also included in every copy of Debian’s distribution of Linux, and has been converted to the Mac, BeOS, and Amiga.”

From a Wired.com story about tech stock prices: VA Linux (LNUX) continues to charge back up, gaining another 4 11/16 to 59 11/16, Hewlett-Packard (HWP) gained 4 39/64 to 125 1/4, Lexmark (LXK) was up 2 43/256 to 70, and Apple (AAPL) was up 2 1/2 to 63 7/16. Palm Computing (PALM) fell 1 1/8 to 42 7/8 and Dell (DELL) lost 9/16 to 33 13/16. (Full disclosure: VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

From a CNet story: “As music-swapping company Napster and the record industry skirmish in court, a bevy of technology companies are coming out with ideas they say can help the two sides settle their legal disputes. Settling lawsuits that could define an industry won’t be that simple, of course. But analysts say a few of the technologies emerging do show some promise for bridging what has appeared to be an insurmountable gap between file-trading start-ups and a music industry loathe to lose control of its copyrights online.”

From Alan Cox via LWN.net: “Since 2.2.17 isn’t out yet I’ve released 2.2.18pre2 versus 2.2.17pre20. So
you need to grab 2.2.16 then apply the 2.2.17pre20 patch then the 2.2.18pre
patch of choice. Ok 2.2.18pre2 merges the large stuff that doesnt interfere with other parts
of the kernel and some small fixes that are needed. Microcode.c also now
compiles correctly. Pretty much all of this is stuff vendors are already
shipping so while it is experimental (paticularly some of the USB) it
shouldn’t impact mainstream code. The AGP/DRM stuff is 2.4 compatible and
works out of the box with the same Xserver setup on the i810 as on 2.4.” Read more.

AMIRIX Systems Inc. has released a new Open Source configuration tool for embedded Linux systems. Amirix is a sponsor of the non-commercial “Embedded Debian Project” whose goal is to create a completely open, multi-vendor embedded Linux software resource based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The
press release is at LinuxPR.