Big_Joe wrote to us with the continuing story of Michael Chaney. Michael is the guy who paid the re-registration fee for the Hotmail domain name, after Microsoft had failed to over the Christmas holiday. He's auctioning the 500$ "thank you" check off on E*Bay and has pledged to donate the winning bid to charity, as well as matching up to $2,000 of that out of his own pocket.

ChrisRijk wrote to us about the release of PKI information to Mozilla. The "Sun-Netscape Alliance" has that announced that it will give mozilla.org a bunch of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) library source code and utilities. This was made possible due to looser regulation of encryption source code by the US Department of Commerce." A FAQ available at the Mozilla web site.

EmilEifrem writes "BrowserWatch has an interesting feature about the status of Mozilla. It's a mail from a Netscape engineer but it's NOT the official word from AOL/Netscape. It talks about how half of the Netscape engineers now use Seamonkey as their main browser, about upcoming dates (first Netscape branded alpha/beta doesn't seem to be far away) as well as engineering priorities and goals. Not the official word but an interesting read nevertheless."

NoWhere Man writes "Over at RB Computing (an AMD-only shop in Ottawa, Canada), they are distributing the AfterBurner, an Athlon Overclocking card, developped by Golden Fingers. It offers on-the-fly frequency and core voltage modifications, that is a reasonable alternative to building your own, as shown at Tom's Hardware Guide. "

This week's interview with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman was conducted verbally, in person, by Slashdot reader Rich Wellner, who transcribed everything you'll read below. A lot of work! (Thanks, Rich.) The questions he asked were the creme de la creme of those you submitted Monday.

Rumours have been floating around for the past week or so that Mike Shaver is leaving Netscape/AOL After e-mailing with Mike yesterday, and reading the recent posting on Mozillazine, I'm sad to confirm it's true. However, while he won't be working on Mozilla as his full time job anymore, he will still be involved with the project, going so far as to say: "Though Mozilla will no longer be my full-time job, I will continue to participate in the community as much as possible, and my new employer is very supportive of that." In any case, we'll miss you.

I personally consider Steve Wozniak the biggest "star" we've ever interviewed on Slashdot. I was s-o-o happy when he agreed to do this interview that you wouldn't believe it. Many excellent questions for him were submitted Monday. Click below to read answers to the 11 questions we felt best represented the hundreds y'all sent in.

Quite a number of people have been writing about the latest Web appliance. Intel is unveiling a Linux/Mozilla box at CES that will run a Celeron processor. Intel is planning pricing to be between $300 and $700, with some upgradability. More technical details will be forthcoming, but one of the interesting parts is that they plan to include a phone in the device, perhaps hoping to replace phones around the house.

Hey! We're Unix junkies, right? That whole mouse thing is just a fad anyway. The CLI is more efficient for a lot of things... and a good ncurses app is gonna run a heckuva lot faster than, say, Netscape. So this is your chance to nominate the non-graphical application you love most. The one with the interface that you wouldn't trade in for all the bloated graphics and icons in the world.

apsmith wrote in wondering what software makers (like Microsoft) will be doing with their software versioning now that we've passed the year 2000 milestone. It's a humorous look at software versioning and it poses some interesting questions. What do you do when you cease using a sensible versioning system in favor of marketing hype (ala "Windows 2000")? Click below for the full text.

Mr. Magoo writes "Citifi.com, CitiBank's new financial services portal, is the latest big web site non-Windows users can't access." When I view the site with Netscape under Windows, I get a marketing blurb that says 'Become a Citi f/i customer and enjoy the convenience of being able to bank, invest, and pay bills 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from any PC that's connected to the Internet.' Tried it with Netscape 4.05 and M12 under Linux, and I get no dice. Lynx 2.82rel.1+ssl under Linux seems okay, though. It seems we've got another poor-web-design victim.

jenkin sear writes "Netscape Time capsule site- original splash screens, and much of the original netscape site, including the release notes for version 0.9. Definitely a trip down memory lane.... I saw this link on scripting news" Warm fuzzies. Sure was simpler then. An interesting similiar and unrelated article also popped out recently, a history of microsoft.com.

PhilLong asks: "I have a friend that is using an IBM keyboard from 5+ years back, the kind that didn't use rubber domes and had an emphatic "click" when used. I'd like to get him a new one so that he's not lost when the current one slips a key, and so he can use the ... ummm ... extra meta key. Where can I find such a keyboard, or more generally, where can I find keyboard reviews (subjective as I know they must be)?" Keyboard reviews? Now that's a neat idea...

Thaddeus was kind enough to send us a letter that Daniel S. Goldin sent out to all the workers at NASA. It's a wonderful letter and despite the problems they have had recently, they deserve congrats for accomplishing so much. Anyway, click below and read the letter. If you agree, let your governmental representative know that you support your Space Agency.

the gaijin writes "I'm looking for an alternative to Netscape Proxy Server, ideally using Linux and an Apache SSL variant. Our architecture follows the "reverse secure proxy model": A proxy server (Solaris + Netscape, 2 machines in round robin) handles HTTPS requests from a browser client. The proxy decodes the request and passes it as an HTTP request to one of the many application servers. The application server returns an HTTP response to the proxy, which then encodes the response and returns HTTPS to the browser client. (Application servers are actually grouped into farms defined by a Radware loadbalancing appliance; the proxy talks to the farms-- but the proxy is unaware of this). Has anyone implemented a model like this using the Apache proxying facilities, using one of the SSL variants? Is it possible? " jimjag writes: There's an article in Web Techniques that shows how to use mod_proxy and mod_rewrite to implement one layer of the above: the reverse proxying part.

synthetic writes "If you go to Fox's website Fox.com, with Netscape in Linux, you get a page saying you are not running a PC or a Mac..." Very disappointing to see such a major website disregard a whole OS...the odd part is that apparently this is over Flash plugins (which actually work). Read on for more.

Greg Miller writes "According to this article , Netscape has received approval to distribute the 128-bit encryption version of Communicator outside the U.S. They've also received limited permission to distribute SuiteSpot servers with strong encryption." [Update: 12/05 03:42 by michael : Slashdot got burned, this article is bogus. See below.]

Juln and many others noted that EPIC filed suit against the NSA for failing to respond to their FOIA request. Both EPIC and the House Committee which supposedly oversees the NSA have asked for documents about the extent of their domestic spying and ECHELON activities, and the NSA has refused to provide information to either. Sounds like it's time to remind the spies who runs this outfit. The story is available at many major news sites.

dougc1 writes "According to this CNET article, Netscape plans to delay release of Communicator 5.0 for two more months." Well, I'm doing okay with 4.7, but it sure would be nice to have a more stable and faster Netscape - someday. (sigh)

There are over 500 Debian maintainers today, up from 100 only a few years ago. Wichert Akkerman has been Project Leader for this brilliant, sometimes unruly (but always interesting) gang since February. Monday you posted questions for Wichert. Today you get answers. (Lots more below)