Red Hat has been working on an adaptation of Multi Level Security called Multi Category Security which is planned to be enabled by default on FC 5 along with other security enhancements

Here are a couple of good articles from the SOA front. The first one provides guidence to architect a powerful and flexible Service-Oriented Architecture that integrates heterogeneous data, simplifying your IT solutions. The second article explores the next-generation business process server, which automates business processes and supports all styles of integration based on SOA and open standards.

According to Cola-Coder, a yellowTAB employee, the first stable SATA driver for ZETA has been implemented. Currently, the driver supports VIA VT6420/6421 chipsets, which will most likely be followed with support for nVidia (nForce) chipsets.

Indonesia's Ministry of Research and Technology Thurday said it will implement a Java Desktop System on Linux as a national-standard desktop, customed-designed for its own culture. This desktop software will be a major component of the new Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS) program that aims to help eliminate the "digital divide in the world's largest archipelago," the ministry and Sun Microsystems said in a joint announcement.

A lot of hooplah has been distributed by Sun Microsystems on the advantages of their OpenSolaris/Solaris 10 release. Martin C. Brown has been using said software for the past few months and files his review that helps answer the question: has someone finally found a Linux killer?

In a move that shows just how far Microsoft has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products. Microsoft plans to include the Message Passing Interface in its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, which went to public beta this week at the Microsoft Developers Conference here and is on track to ship in the first half of next year.

According to many blogs and the Microsoft OEM site, Microsoft is due to release Windows Media Center Edition Update (codenamed Emerald) soon. The update dubbed "Update Rollup 2" will be released in approximately a month. The update will be released to OEM's within the next week. In the same link you will find information on MCE's future.

"VIA is beginning to ramp up production on the successors to their C3 part, the C7 and C7-M CPU's. Keith Kowal, marketing manager for VIA's chipset platform group, took some time on his promotional tour to talk with us about the new platform."

Time Warner and Microsoft are in advanced talks over Microsoft buying a stake in Time Warner's America Online unit, the New York Post reported on Thursday. Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft's Web unit MSN.

Again, more news from the PDC. Microsoft senior vice president Steven Sinofsky took the stage Wednesday to discuss Office 12, which he said would hit Beta 1 within a "couple months." Betas of the Open Office XML format schemes are available starting today. Also, more screenshots of Vista build 5219 can be found here, shots of IE7 here. MS also announced a developer's toolbar for IE 6 and 7. The toolbar would allow the developer to see how pages would look in various screen resolutions, validate HTML and CSS code, and perform numerous other functions that Web designers would find useful. You can read transcripts of the various keynotes here.

Sun Microsystems is expected to revamp its core Unix server line on Tuesday with the debut of its high-end UltraSparc IV+ processor. The big UltraSparc IV+ improvement is the inclusion of 2MB of built-in high-speed cache memory where UltraSparc IV had none. The initial clock speed of the dual-core chip is expected to be 1.5GHz.

In PDC related news: "Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a WinFX namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently in beta) for both client and server versions of Windows."

A consortium of Linux vendors created to promote the commercial use of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution has released its first product, and plans more. "The first preview release of DCC 3.0 PR1 was made available last week," Progeny chairman and Debian founder Ian Murdock wrote in his blog. He added that the next version was due late this week or early next week.

With Breezy Badger on its way its time for the announcement of what the next +1 release will be called, and the Ubuntu team has decided that the next +1 release (6.04) will be called The Dapper Drake. This release of Ubuntu will be supported for 3 years after release, and the Ubuntu developers are going to work as hard and as long as possible on Dapper Drake, as it's what they're going to release in response to MS's release of Windows Vista.