The media's ability to turn a cute idea into a raging hype feedback loop has crossed with the post Sept 11th paranoia factor yet again as an FBI field office in Pittsburgh warns businesses of the pernicious new pastime of "Warchalking." See this Computerworld story. Warchalking is the latest non-trend to sweep the internet, and it involves scrawling information about close-by wireless networks on the streets in chalk. Despite the fact that nobody is actually doing it, just about every media outlet in the world has reported on it.

A PC World article reports (thinly) on the Sergey Brin speech at LinuxWorld. Google certainly stands as one of the most high profile and impressive implementations of Linux on a massive scale. The Google co-founder attributes some of Google's success at building a cost-effective platform to the Linux OS.

Plenty of Linux news today due to LinuxWorld Expo being in full swing today. According to a ZDNet News article, UnitedLinux, the project uniting the Linux distributions from Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE Linux and Turbolinux, will be rolling out a two-stage beta program, first a private beta for partners, and then an open beta for the Linux-using public. These releases are scheduled for late August and September, respectively.

According to an EWeek article, the The Free Standards Group will announce today that Caldera, Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE are Linux Standard Base certified. The LSB Certification program was launched at LinuxWorld in New York in late January.

"Red Hat Inc. is looking to expand its general retail Linux and enterprise server software offerings and so will release a formal desktop Linux product geared toward the corporate market early next year. Mark De Visser, a vice president at the Raleigh, N.C., open-source technology provider, told eWEEK Tuesday that Red Hat is "working on a special desktop product offering for the corporate market. There is now a place, as well as demand, for this." Hence the greatly improved - from the simple user's point of view- Limbo beta. Red Hat is after the corporate desktops, eWeek and News.com report.

So, you want to write an operating system. We discussed earlier a generic set of considerations that are important, from my experience, for this type of adventure. We proceed to look at solutions to the problem of actually getting started with writing your system: how to do it when you know you don't know what you're doing, making it work before making it work fast, and what to do when things go wrong.

The IE problem has been around for at least five years and could allow an attacker to intercept credit card and/or personl data when a user is making a purchase. Konqueror also had the same problem, but Waldo Bastian fixed the problem 95 minutes after it was reported. You can get the fixed Konqueror version from the KDE CVS, or if you wait for KDE 3.03 next week. Read about the IE flaw at ZDNews.

You can call Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, just about anything you want, just don't call him a desktop guy. Raikes is charged with the responsibility of guiding Microsoft's enormously successful desktop business -- the jewel of which is Office XP -- into the new era of computing where desktop, server, and peer-to-peer technologies are beginning to all swirl together as a seamless whole. Read the interview at InfoWorld.

QNXZone reports that the eQip Project has recently gone open source and it is available via anonymous CVS. The eQip project supports several models of the HP/Compaq iPaq PDA, and rumour has it that the Sharp Zaurus has been running QNX on the test bench. Plenty of screenshots here.

According to IDC, the Linux installed base, currently at 3.5 million units, will climb to 8.6 million server units alone by 2005. By contrast, Unix will drop from 2.61 million units to 2.53 million units. But Windows will still lead the way with an installed base of 8.6 million units in 2002 and 13.84 million server units in 2005. How far Linux climbs in the OS market remains to be seen. "In five to 10 years, Unix will be overtaken by it. Whether we will get by Windows, we'll get close," deVisser said. Read the report at InfoWorld. As for the LinuxWorld, ZDNews has an interesting all-around article.

OEone has released their source code and have now a free download of the HomeBase Desktop, a desktop enviroment based on Mozilla's API that runs on top of Red Hat Linux. Update: OfB hosts an interview with Peter Bojanic who is the VP, Software Development of OEone.

Prologue by the editor-in-chief: "A bit more than two years ago, while I was still serving at BeNews, I asked Jeremy Friesner to write an article and present his cross-platform client-server messaging system for dynamic distributed applications, MUSCLE. Two weeks later, he came back to me with a multi-page article, explaining MUSCLE. To demonstrate the power of MUSCLE, Jeremy created a demo application based on it. The result was BeShare.

The prospect that a vital element of Microsoft's .NET will debut in a Java IDE has come a step closer. A plug-in that connects Microsoft's Corp's C Sharp programming language with the Eclipse Framework has been built by Puteaux, France-based Improve SA. Eclipse is built in Java's Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT). Read the report at TheRegister.

The news from the Gobe Software front seem to be slightly sad, but only at first glance. Sad because, Gobe as we know it is no more, as it sold the gobeProductive source code and rights to FreeRadicalSoftware, Inc. However, FreeRadicalSoftware's business plan requires them to GPL the popular office suite, allowing everyone to access gobeProductive's source for Windows, Linux and even BeOS. The official announcement is expected next week. FreeRadicalSoftware was created recently by the ex-boss of Gobe Software, Bruce Hammond, and some other ex-Gobe and non-Gobe people. Read more for our exclusive interview with Bruce regarding the open sourcing of GP3 under the GPL.
Update: And an additional comment from Gobe's Tom Hoke.