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Some Web users are reporting seeing a reformatted Google results page that has the links to specialized search pages listed in the left-hand column instead of placed horizontally across the top of the search box.

Open Source Pioneer Larry Augustin Joins Fonality's Board of Directors

[Ed: Note: You have to click through an ad to get to the story. - dcparris]

After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape.

Mozilla's Usenet(define) public newsgroups have been moved from netscape.public.mozilla.* to just mozilla.*. The renaming officially ends Mozilla's public Netscape news legacy after more than 8 years of active use.

Novell, through its CoolSolutions community-relations website, is conducting an online public survey to determine which Windows-only applications are most likely to keep Windows users from migrating to Linux. The company also wants to know which Windows-only apps would be most popular on Linux desktops if they were ported to Linux.

More than a few Linux users have become upset because they have trouble making scanners work properly with their systems. Most of the time, however, "the fault doesn't lie with Linux," writes DesktopLinux.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Instead, "it's the eternal problem of hardware vendors neither supplying drivers nor the information developers need to write drivers," he continues.

Mathieu Allard, the free software advocate who ran for the New Democrats in the riding of Saint Boniface, Manitoba, finished third in the Canadian national election on January 23. Since he was not elected, he is returning to his job as executive assistant to Christine Melnick, the Minister of Housing and Social Services in the Manitoba provincial government. He plans to look for new ways to promote the use of free software in government.

Will Judge Alito allow the government to snoop on your Web surfing, e-mail, and Internet chatting? MozillaQuest Magazine (mozillaquest.com) reports: "the Constitution expressly forbids the President . . . the authority to spy upon American citizens without first obtaining search warrants . . . That includes our e-mail, our Web surfing, our Internet communications, and so forth. Whether George Bush and his regime are exceeding those powers likely will work their way up to the Supreme Court.

Scalix and Zimbra offer promising e-mail solutions that exploit Ajax to offer rich Web clients.

Perth based e-learning vendor HarvestRoad (ASX:HRD) has signed a software partnership deal with Linux vendor Red Hat. HarvestRoad develops solutions for the education, defence and enterprise marketson the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

PCLinuxOS, a three-year-old LiveCD desktop Linux distribution that originated as a fork of Mandrake, now has its own website. PCLinuxOS.com went live earlier this week. "We now have a home of our own, thanks to the support from donations received last month," distro founder "Texstar" wrote.

This article shows you how Soft references, like weak references, can help applications prevent object loitering by enlisting the aid of the garbage collector in making cache eviction decisions.

"This could be a new opportunity for Linux to find additional niches above and beyond the home and [small office] markets where Macintosh has historically been strong," Interarbor Solutions Principal Analyst Dana Gardner told

The Free Software Foundation is already hearing complaints from companies about the GPL 3's provisions for digital rights management, which it calls"a malicious feature and can never be tolerated."

[Ed: It's good for companies to be uncomfortable with the GPL's anti-DRM provision. They really shouldn't be so comfortable about depriving people of their freedom to begin with. - dcparris]

The UK Government plans to toughen up computer crime laws under proposals outlined in the Police and Justice Bill on Wednesday. The bill would double the maximum jail sentence for hacking into computer systems from five years to ten years, a provision that will classify hacking as a more serious offense and make it easier to extradite computer crime suspects from overseas. Denial of service attacks, something of a grey area under current regulations, would be clearly classified as a criminal offense under amendments to the 1990 Computer Misuse Act (CMA) proposed in the bill.

Book review The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders& Deceivers

Virtualization is an old idea--running multiple distinct operating systems atop a powerful box has a lot of advantages. Xen is a new virtualization platform. Despite its youth, its Linux support is very good. Kris Buytaert explains the basics of virtualization and shows how to configure and install Xen and to create new virtual machines.

Microsoft may not be off the hook with the European Commission (EC), despite this week's sweeping promise to license Windows Server communications source code. An EC spokesperson has reportedly called it "premature" to assume that access alone to the code would solve the problem of Microsoft's failure to comply.

Microsoft to open up Windows source code to rivals MICROSOFT caved in to European regulators and agreed to open up the Windows source code to rivals today. The decision goes back to 2004 when the EU ordered the Vole to share the code. Associated Press reported Microsoft lead legal counsel Brad Smith as saying that companies on both sides of the Atlantic were being given the details of its offer. However, he said rivals would be expected to pay for the source code and regulators will want to see the details of the Microsoft move. The wire reported an EU commission representative as saying that it, and not Microsoft would be the judge of whether Microsoft was complying with its rulings. µ

Having spent the last six years overseeing the acquisition of, integration of, and partnership creation with open source software companies—and managing open source litigation, I am still surprised by how little CIOs truly understand about open source software's potential benefit and impact on their companies' fiscal and legal health. With 80% to 90% of Fortune 1000 companies using open source, it's here to stay—as are the licenses and obligations that come with using it.

If you are an old school Linux or Unix user, you probably remember the System Administrator's Tool for Scanning Networks (SATAN). In 1995, SATAN brought browser-based network auditing to the world. Despite its initial splash, SATAN fell to the wayside due to lack of updates. Thanks to the kind folks at the Advanced Research Corp., SATAN is back, in the form of the Security Auditor's Research Assistant (SARA), a kinder, gentler, easier to use, and more updated auditing tool.