From a story at The Register: Virgin Mobile has staked its claim to the world’s first mobile phone with an in-built MP3 player. The phone has actually been around for a while and can be found Spain, Germany, Austria, Portugal, and Italy. However, in a further example of Virgin’s PR being ahead of the game, Virgin Mobile has knocked up a press release saying it is launching the phone in the UK.

EchoFactor, a company spinning off from Infonautics hopes to erase the problem webmasters have in keeping content fresh by finding relevant headlines from top websites and making them available to third parties at no charge. When it comes to development, EchoFactor is striving to be a model open-source citizen. “If we’re going with the premise that topic enthusiasts are getting information for free, let’s take it to the extreme and use open source for all development, Apache, Linux, PHP,” said Andrea Michalek, co-founder and chief technology officer. Check out the story at TechWeb.

Moving to ease verification engineers’ reuse and exchange of complex testbenches, Cadence Design Systems Inc. will open-source-license the TestBuilder testbench class library from the company’s Verification Cockpit product. TestBuilder is a C++ class library that provides testbench-authoring capabilities to create reusable random, constraint-driven self-checking tests, reports the EE Times.

From column at afr.com.au: “Network Associates’ announcement of a mile-wide back door in its PGP security software is deeply concerning. Not because PGP is the sole means of online security — on the best estimates, it boasts only 7 million users — but because PGP is the gold standard, and its breach casts a pall over the entire crypto industry.”

From a San Fransisco Chronicle story: “Sales of Windows 2000, the software for running corporate computer networks and desktops, have fallen short of some analysts’ expectations. The latest operating system from Microsoft simply isn’t as sexy as e-commerce or Internet infrastructure, or even Linux, the Unix variation that has garnered a grassroots following by painting itself as the anti-Microsoft.”

XEmacs/GTK 21.1.11 is released by William M. Perry, who’s been hacking on Emacs and XEmacs for close to 10 years, after discovering it during a course on Scheme at Indiana University.

From an Inter@ctive Week report: “The popular CBS television show Survivor might have ended, but a new game of survival of the fittest has only just begun among business-to-business Internet marketplaces. Some analysts have been projecting the number of these online exchanges to grow to more than 10,000 in the next few years. But now analysts like Deloitte Consulting expect the more than 1,400 marketplaces that exist today to shrink drastically in the next two years leaving as few as 400 marketplaces to survive.”

“Most of our discussion has focused on Linux as an inexpensive and viable alternative to existing solutions to math ed software. In addition to covering all that, I decided to ‘up the ante’ and push Linux as an operating system that is also capable of ‘state of the art’ applications. I was surprised to find out how many schools are already doing this. I think this is really one of the strong points for using Linux.” Check out the full report.

Micron Technology, one of the world’s largest memory chip makers, announced Monday that it has filed suit against high-speed memory interface technology developer Rambus. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, asserts violations of Federal antitrust laws, and also invalidity, non-infringement, and non-enforceability of Rambus’ patents, the Boise, Idaho-based memory supplier said. The full report is at PC World.

DeCSS, the DVD decryption software the MPAA tries to declare illegal, is a topic that touches politics, science and art, but has so far not been discussed in any of those contextes. DeArt aims to open the discussion in one of these fields – art. DeArt is an art contest, starting on September 1st and running until the end of the year, that accepts submissions of original artwork and will be judging them, including prices for the best pieces. Jon Johanson, one of the authors
of DeCSS, is a member of the jury. Emmanuel Goldstein, the MPAA’s target in New York, has also been invited. The full press release is at LWN.net.