Java is designed for secure development and deployment. It is often said that security is incorporated in Java from the ground up and not added as an afterthought. This article is excerpted from the newly published book "J2EE Security for Servlets, EJB's, and Web Services".

LinuxElectrons.com is reviewing Red Hat's Fedora Test-3. Screenshots included.

NetBSD's Steve Woodford announces that he has committed various Xscale micro-optimizations to the NetBSD/arm ports. NetBSD/arm is a collective term for NetBSD running on systems based on ARM Ltd's ARM architecture. Also, NetBSD's Frank van der Linden announced that he has added gdb support to the tree, as a result the NetBSD/amd64 port is now completely crossbuildable. NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors.

The team that brought RISC OS Aemulor has another killer app this autumn for the Risc OS users - Cino: The Iyonix DVD player. Read more Risc OS news at Drobe and IconBar.

GCC 3.3.2 includes numerous new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes. Grab it here. Additionally, this interview at WindowsForDevices is with a young Russian programmer who earlier this year launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform.

Just three days after a Microsoft vice president--who is in charge of Microsoft.com and Windows Update--told thousands of delegates at a conference in Florida that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP would be available by the end of 2003, the company has effectively retracted the comments and said that customers will see only a beta version of SP2 this year. In the meantime, Microsoft debuts first Windows XP Security Pack.