Nokia will donate the proceeds from the sales of 500 Nokia 770 Internet Tablets to the GNOME foundation.

KDE 3.4.1 has been released. It is a maintenance release which "provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and greatly enhanced support for existing translations and new translations. "

Software developed by S.R.D. (Systems Research and Development), recently acquired by IBM, allows huge collections of personal data (travel manifests, medical data) to be compared with other databases, such as terrorist watch lists, while not actually disclosing the data between two entities. What's actually compared is a one-way hash, and any "hits" between two lists, would identify a record number that would presumably lead to a request for the whole record. S.R.D. was originally funded by the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture capital arm.

Sun Microsystems is embarking on a $50 million ad campaign, associating its products and services with some of its prominent customers such as eBay, General Motors, and Major League Baseball. Responding to declining sales and influence in the industry, Sun is revamping its image, down to their packaging, office decor and even on-hold music.

Desert Spring-Time (DST) is an OS based on the OCaml runtime+native code compiler. Their goal is to build a robust system through extensive use of OCaml language features, such as static type checking. Currently, this is only a prototype, and is best tested with qemu. More information can be found here.

KernelTrap reports: Colin Percival continues the discussion regarding the shared-cache vulnerability inherent in multi-core processors, offering potential mitigation techniques in the form of fixes to the FreeBSD schedulers. Based on Percival's original discovery, information leakage between threads which share a processor core and the subsequent opportunity to monitor memory access patterns can be prevented by eliminating the co-scheduling of threads that have differing privileges.

Power consumption, supply voltage, junction temperature, system cooling requirements, and processor clock rate are all physically and thermodynamically related. By understanding the relationships, system cost and complexity trade-offs, and resource requirements, system designers can strike a better balance between requirements. See how you can incorporate emergent cooling and adaptive power control methods into embedded system designs.

If you're on the hunt for Linux ISO Torrents you might want to check out the long list of recently released distro torrents over at LinuxISOtorrent.com. They've got frequently updated torrents from A (Arch) to Z (Zen). The site only does one thing, but does it well - helps you get the latest Linux distros downloaded via BitTorrent, quickly.

Artist Futurismo Zugakousaku has posted some creations on his web site that he made with Quartz Composer, a new great technology in Tiger. (the videos are apparently only visible using the latest version of Quicktime in Tiger) If it makes you feel inspired, here a small tutorial that will help you get started with Quartz Composer and to develop a customized RSS Screen Saver.

The 2005 GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) is underway in Stuttgart, and there are live and archived streams of the events available. It's almost like being there! In more GUADEC news, Nat Friedman notes some interesting finds on his blog: SymphonyOS and Thunar.

The Financial Express reports that, for the first time, sales of servers running Windows matched the revenues of Unix servers: Revenue for Windows servers grew 12.3 per cent to $4.2 billion in the quarter while unit shipments grew 10.7 per cent. Unix servers saw 2.8 per cent revenue growth to $4.2 billion while unit shipments increased 5 per cent. HP made gains on leader IBM, Dell posted huge growth, and Linux made up an ever larger share. It appears that both Windows and Linux continue to chip away at proprietary Unix from both ends.

Update: It appears that we mischaracterized the conclusions in our title and our summary on this story. Greg KH was referring only to the ELF vulnerability in this story. Whether we were deliberately mislead by the submitter of this story or not, we regret the error.

The original story: According to "Greg KH," co-maintainer of the 2.6.x.y series of important stability and security fixes, the Linux kernel does not suffer from the much-hyped hyper threading vulnerability that affected the BSDs: " The main reason there have not been any updates, is that there really isn't a problem for the 2.6 kernel. The original author has admited this finally, no one was ever able to reproduce it on a 2.6 kernel. The only reason I released a kernel update, was at the time, we thought there was an off-chance that there was a problem. However in further testing, it has not been the case." This confirms Linus's earler assertion.

The first computer Apple released was also its cheapest until the release of the Mac mini.  It was an innovative machine.  Unlike its peers, it included a keyboard interface and onboard graphics, options that cost hundreds of dollars on other platforms.  It even included mass storage: the machine had a built-in cassette interface.  Read the article at MLAgazine.

A HOWTO on GIT patch management software that replaces Bitkeeper has been published on the Linux Kernel mailing list.