A reader writes "Check the latest Kurt's Closet; he points to some interesting flaws on Debian 2.2, from a security point of view. " Kurt's Closet is part of SecurityPortal - he's got some good points, but it's also good to remember, as the article points out, that nothing is automagically secure. Always do testing on your own.Update: 08/30 01:44 PM by H :Thanks to Ben Collins, Debian guy, for sending a response which I've included below.Update: 08/30 04:32 PM by H :Kurt has written an update that will be appearing on the site soon. In the meantime, he also sent me the text - read below for more.

More below on what is surely one of the slowest patents ever granted (to our inquisitive friends with the radar domes, no less), and smidgeons of news on such various and sundry as Napster (perhaps you've heard of it?) and Iridium (perhaps you wish you'd never heard of it?), not to mention more on the destruction of the submarine Kursk.

icqqm writes: "The people from AlphaNumerica have released their Mozilla theme builder which, of course, runs in Mozilla itself. Looks MUCH easier to use than the horribly complicated instructions fot XML files on Netscape's site" Note that it doesn't work with current builds, but it ought to once the dust settles a bit. I've been using Mozilla more than Navigator these days... Still want to get Galeon working since it looks to be a lot more slimmed down.

dwlt writes "I'm sure lots of people have sent this already, but take a look at the story on videogames.com for the full scoop on Nintendo's Game Cube (gotta catch 'em all!), and Game Boy Advance. The controller is kind of crazy, though..." Let me tell ya about the countless hours spent in the geek houses drinking and playing Mario Kart 64: Kurt The Pope is a wildman under the influence of alcohol, and the new one looks cool.(thanks to those of you who wasted no time in submitting a new Slashdot icon too ;)

chromatic is back with a mini-compendium of introductory Linux texts -- and yes, they have the famously protected "Dummies" trademark. Don't scoff at the nature of these books, though; the skill of translating the arcana of any computer topic (and boy are they all arcane to the uninitiated!) into language that mom, kids and the guy down the street can understand is not a common one. If you don't know what a root prompt (or an editor) is, or why you might want one, it's hard to do much else with your system.

Bart asks: "How can you shop online and protect your privacy? I have been trying without success for a few weeks to shop at the online site of the bigest supermarket chain here in England. My problem is that either I am not using Internet Explorer or Netscape or that I have set up Junkbuster to return a spurious user-agent. With this configuration I can visit my bank, transfer money and make payments, I can visit my two stockbrokers and make deals of up to 100,000 USD but I can't go to Tesco and buy cat food." It seems odd that certain places require a bit too much information from you before they will even do business. What information do you think is fair for Web sites to posess on an individual, and how far do current e-Commerce sites cross that line?

The fight to keep standards Open and Free is raging in the audio compression business. With mp3 tearing up bandwidth and the court system, Christopher Montgomery and the rest of the Ogg Vorbis team are working hard to ensure that the mp3 format has a Free alternative in their system, which seems to outperform mp3 everywhere it counts. I got the opportunity to pull Chris away from development just long enough to tell us exactly what's going on, and to answer some questions about the process and the product necessary to take on mp3.

Uart writes: "AOL is building a Cross-Platform FDO to allow AOL content to be viewed on any number of platforms/environments. This includes a Linux client. Why is this big news you ask? Because it allows many many more people to use Linux, or other non-Microsoft operating systems. An image of the AOL site is right here. BTW, there will also be a Netscape\IE plugin to allow people to access AOL content from their Web browser." Rather then the traditional desktop PC model for viewing, a Linux-client allows AOL to make small devices that /just/ run AOL. Why on Earth would you need anything more? *grin*

pug23 writes: "CNET has an article about the Samuel 2, [a 1 Ghz-plus] processor which Via plans to begin production on in the first half of next year. More competition in this area can only be a good thing. Apparently they introduced the Samuel 1 (at speeds between 500 and 600 MHz) in June, but have been marketing it primarily in Russia, India, China and Eastern Europe."

As the title says - Mozilla M17 is out. Release notes are available at that Web page as well. As usual - please test it and submit bug reports.. (please note: this is NOT the nightly build that was posted here previously). Update: I just got note that Netscape 6.0 PR2 is also out. Netscape bug reports should be reported here only!

This is Slashback. Read it before it's wrong again. Find out more about Mandrake's new honcho, the neurons firing in the American legal system's brains on Napster, Yet Another Cool GPLization, and Larry's new toy.

Baldrson and other folks as well write: "Dan Brumleve is at it again with Brown Orifice. In this episode, our fearless grey hat opens a security hole in the Web's foundation that makes Napster look positively tame by comparison. Be careful with this, kids. It turns your Netscape Web browser into a Web server that can serve up your entire file system to any other Web browser."

Ever more information for you, the loyal photographic memory-blessed reader. That is to say, more on Linux on Macs -- and not just the sexy new ones. Evolving attitudes in Kansas. Misinformation about Survivor. And cheap, cheap boxes for your node-in-every-room home network.

randomErr writes: "Recently a new site opened up that shows these youngsters how we had to surf in the old days. Deja Vu.org pulls a given URL and filters out the tags according to what was viewable by your chosen browser. Just for kicks take a look at how Slashdot.org looks on Netscape 0.9 and IE 2.0" Very fun -- the timeline is interesting reading, too. It's like a trip down Memory Lane. Or something.

NoWhere Man writes: "Tom's Hardware has posted up their dealings with the new PIII 1.13GHz processor. Apparently without a special board with a new bios from Intel it will not even run correctly. Any motherboard that has not got the special micro code update for this very processor will ultimately fail. The review has some interesting facts about the processor as well."

tetrad writes: "Suck admittedly isn't the most optimistic of sites, but more often than not, it's right on the money. Today's article is more of an obituary. 'Mozilla is dead, or might as well be,' says author Greg Knauss. While some might argue that Mozilla still has breath in it, Suck begs to 'pull the plug,' and points to Mozilla's decreasing market share, feature bloat, and failure to release a marketable product. It also jabs at the techies running the show: 'The Mozilla Project programmers repeatedly abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for -- and this is the technical term -- cool shit.'" With the next MXX right around the corner, I have to disagree: besides that, I use Mozilla frequently and find that with a few minor exceptions, the latest builds are as good or better than Netscape under Linux (although secure transactions are problematic).

barbaBob asks: "I'm looking for a powerful and secure e-mail client that can handle large volumes of mail for multiple accounts (a mix of POP3 and IMAP). Since I don't want Outlook to be an option, I've been searching for alternatives (eMailMan is an excellent resource). Eudora Pro is a powerful client app, but isn't very stable running on Win2K so far. OpenSoft's ExpressMail seems to be an attractive option with its heavy focus on security and encryption. Netscape Mail is not up to the job, since it doesn't offer filtering. Pegasus Mail is another possibility. HP's OpenMail is very attractive in that if offers full compatability with Outlook/Exchange server-side-drop-in replacement, runs on Linux/Unix - but the client seems to be available to licensed users only so I can't try it yet. So what do you use when stuck with Windows for certain tasks?"

Dacta writes "At last, Interbase 6.0 is available (with source) for download. The announcement is here, with dowload mirrors in Chicago, Herndon and San Jose You may also be interested in the licence - basically it is MPL with "Interbase" substituted for Mozilla/Netscape."

Spasemunki writes "Mozillazine is running a link to (and commentary on)this letter written by the Web Standards Project, blasting Netscape for failing to deliver on Netscape 5/6 in a timely fashion. They argue that the inability of NS to produce a ready-for-prime-time, standards compliant browser has made it harded to coax other developers into adopting standards, and that the zombie-like continued existance of Netscape 4 in its various .x's represents an ongoing offense to standards compliance. These criticisms have been around for a while, but the WSP sums them up well, and gives Mozilla advocates (myself included) some things to answer to."

Last Tuesday you asked Ingo Molnar, Red Hat kernel hacker, about the means by which his TUX Web server recently achieved such fantastic results in SpecWeb99 . He was kind enough to respond with at-length answers addressing licensing, the reality of threads under Linux, the realism of benchmarks, and more. Thanks, Ingo!