Related link: http://news.osdir.com/article458.html

Sun is planning to meet with IBM with respect to open sourcing Java. /dev/mind/blown

“Sun is closely evaluating the effectiveness of the process.” Wow. Some folks saw IBM’s latest letter as payback for Sun’s open letter to Eclipse, but maybe this is all for real.

Related link: http://www.vnunet.com/News/1153081

“Antivirus firm F-Secure has apologised for sending the Netsky.B virus to several thousand of its UK customers and partners via a mailing list.”

Related link: http://osdir.com/Article202.phtml

As some of you may know some of my passions revolve around P2P, online privacy, and open source apps. I have the privilege of being able to present an introductory article on one of my favorite new applications: MUTE.

This is a mouthful, but MUTE is a cross-platform, P2P, anonymous, and open source file sharing client/network. Keyword: Anonymous.

I’ll leave the intricacies up to the program’s author who also wrote the article, but if I may whet your appetite with one more buzz word… it uses mechanisms inspired by ant behavior.

I have this running on my iBook when in Linux or OS X, and a windows machine.

I urge you to give it a try it unless you want to end up on a Pepsi/iTunes commercial during the Superbowl. If you know what I mean.

Since the network is new the wealth of sharable material is a bit sparse in places, but give it a chance to grow. Legal pressure is sure to push more and more people off the current popular networks.

I shudder.

Related link: http://news.oreillynet.com/pub/n/MSSourceCodeLeak

660MBs worth of source code snippets of Windows2000 and NT4 have been leaked onto the net.

I fail to see how this could be a good thing™.

Got code?

Related link: http://news.osdir.com/article447.html

Parlez vous Linux? You might soon if you work for the city of Paris.

Let’s take a lesson from Munich and make sure Paris receives some clever social engineering and swag.

Linux? Il y a moins bien, mais c’est plus cher.

Related link: http://news.oreillynet.com/pub/n/ReturnofNachi

Nachi 2: The Return of Nachi. It sounds like one of those terrible ninja movies that are so fun to watch, but this superhero of a virus is your inbox’s best friend.

Nachi is a virus that is spreading across the internet right now cleaning and patching the MyDoom security hole. It eradicates the virus, then automatically downloads and installs the needed patches. Good thing too. Trojan horse, Mitglieder-H, is now on the loose exploiting the same MS security hole.

Advocating the use of this, and even celebrating it is supercharged with ethical concerns, but I for one thank the author.

Don’t get any wild ideas folks. This kind of thing could get you in serious trouble despite good intentions.

Nachi! Nachi! Nachi!

Related link: http://news.oreillynet.com/pub/n/Deanswitcher

Howard Dean’s campaign is launching “Switcher” ads for the Wisconsin primary. All the fun, none of the Yarrgghh!

Voting is enabled. So check ‘em out and vote for your favorite one.

Yaarrghhh?

Related link: http://news.osdir.com/article443.html

I love it when a company lets their employees speak.

Some Linux engineers at Dell have started their own Linux site (on Dell’s servers, so it’s semi-officially rubberstamped) and weblog to talk about running Linux on Dell hardware.

What’s even cooler? Read between the lines: “Welcome to the Dell Linux Community Web. This site is dedicated to providing any information that may be useful regarding your usage of Linux on your Dell equipment. While Dell primarily works with and officially supports Red Hat Linux, many of our customers choose to run other distributions.”