"Windows XP, which has been marketed by Microsoft as "the most secure version ever," has been found to have a flaw so bone-headed that it renders passwords ineffective as a means of keeping people out of your PC. Reader Tony DeMartino alerted me to the problem, which all administrators of Windows XP machines should immediately take to heart:" Read Brian's article at BrianBuzz.com.

Red Hat and Intel have settled a licensing hiccup that threatened to prevent the Linux company from contributing to Intel's open-source project--a reminder of the frictions that can arise between the commercial tech world and the open-source community.

"Over the past year and change I've worked on porting quite a few projects to OS X. At first, it's a pretty scary ordeal, but most of the issues you'll run into are easily solved if you know how. To save yourself the trouble of figuring this out yourself, read on..." The article is located at Advogato. More porting tips at Fink's site.

At January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, PC Magazine editor-in-chief Michael Miller talked with Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates. The conversation ranged from Tablet PCs and Microsoft's effort—dubbed SPOT—to infuse watches and other everyday objects with online intelligence, Longhorn, to a slated Xbox Live showdown between Gates and NBA star Shaquille O'Neal. "I'm a little worried," Gates conceded, regarding the face-off with Shaq.

The Bush administration signed off Friday on the final version of the United States' strategy for protecting the Internet and securing information systems. Additionally, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants even more power to snoop on the Internet, spy on private conversations and install secret microphones, spyware and keystroke loggers.

Plexuscom, a designer and manufactures of broadband Internet access solutions and appliances, has reached an agreement with Genesi Sarl to produce and deliver limited quantities of the PegasosPPC computer for release at CeBIT 2003. Genesi and Plexuscom will share a Booth at CeBIT, 12-19 March in Hannover, Germany. Read the specs and see the pictures at the morphos-news.de site.

Until now, the internet has largely been used as a tool for communication - but new applications are starting to use the internet to coordinate work between machines. This could lay the basis for a whole new level of automation across society, leading to great gains in productivity. The first step in this process is 'grid computing'.

FreeBSD team's Scott Long lays out a roadmap for FreeBSD-5 stable in this informative email. He says that although the latest release of FreeBSD 5 marks a major milestone in FreeBSD's history, there are significant improvements necessary in the areas of SMP, kernel lockdown, performance, network driver stability, ACPI and much more. He also presents a tentative schedule for the rest of the year for FreeBSD 5.1 and 5.2 releases.

"For the last few weeks I have been reporting on the development cycle of Mandrake 9.1. Then, the presence of an ISO image for Mandrake PPC 9.1 Beta 1 piqued my curiosity, and some days later two ISO images for Mandrake PPC 9.1 Beta 2 were made available on the various mandrake mirrors. Among my obsol... err, I mean, my old computers, I have a 350 MHz iMac which hasn't seen much use for the last 8 months. So without any extraordinary expectations, I decided to attempt the installation of this different flavour of Mandrake Linux. I was in for a few good surprises..." Read the article at DistroWatch.

"Sun Microsystems' Java software and Solaris operating system haven't always gotten along, an internal memo indicates, but Sun says it has fixed the problems in the two years since the memo was written. The version of Java for Solaris is a poor choice for many types of programs, is slow to load, isn't well-supported within Sun and requires too much memory to run, several Sun engineers said in the memo." Read the rest at ZDNet.

On Feb. 12, Norway's Trolltech formally announced its relationship with IBM, which is using Trolltech's ATopia office application suite as part of its 405LP design. LinuxPlanet caught up with the nine-year-old company's CEO Haavard Nord to ask him about the IBM deal, the latest on Trolltech's Qt libraries, the embedded device market, and about what Sun could learn from Trolltech's dual-licensing scheme.

The MacOSX 10.2.4 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications, services and technologies: Address Book, Classic compatibility, Finder, FireWire, Graphics, OpenGL, and Sherlock. It includes AFP and Windows file service improvements, as well as audio, disc recording, graphics, and printing improvements.

Microsoft showed off some of the forthcoming programmability features of "Yukon," the next version of its SQL Server database, here at the VSLive! developer conference on Thursday. Yukon won't be an XML database, but will rather integrate support for XML data types into the relational SQL Server database.

Microsoft is working on a newer version of its Media Center software, which is expected to debut on PCs around the third quarter, according to sources.