The FreeBSD ‘Zine is chock full of useful and interesting articles about running FreeBSD. There are a few lame features, but for the most part, the articles are very solid. They’re running a good series on qmail, and they have some good articles on using vi and beginning shell scripting for people who are new to Unix.

Did you know that auto manufacturers have been installing black boxes in cars for a few years? The New York Times reports.

GNU Fortran author Craig Burley has a nice writeup of his trip to Linux Expo. I am ashamed to admit that even though Linux Expo was held in the very town where I live, I did not go. Chalk it up to being too busy on the infernal SQL book and being busy with projects at work. Maybe next year.

Not content to dominate the world of personal computing, Microsoft seems intent on taking over the exploding market for reference books. Realizing an opportunity to enter an emerging market with few established players, Microsoft is about to publish a dictionary of its own. Merriam Webster and Ambrose Bierce weren’t available for comment, but I’m certain that they’re concerned about going the way of Digital Research and OS/2. I’ll be interested to see whether the definition of monopoly in the dictionary is as enlightened as the encyclopedia entry for Bill Gates in Encarta.

This is the type of response I hoped to see from the Linux community in the wake of the Mindcraft performance survey that pitted Linux against Windows NT on quad-processor servers. Linux is free software, why whine about it when you can just fix it?

I project to create a secure version of Linux has been undertaken by a group in the Netherlands. I suppose they’re working something that’s basically analagous to OpenBSD, a derivative of the operating system that will be written with security as the foremost concern. I don’t see how they can truly commit to this unless they’re willing to fork the Linux kernel. Maybe they’re just interested in securing the stuff on top of the kernel and contributing to kernel security within the context of other new work. I also wonder how this meshes with the Linux Security Audit Project.

Scott Rosenberg takes on weblogs in his weekly column. This is one of a recent spate of stories about weblogs, but it’s more interesting than all of the others. He links to the usual suspects in the column.

I really believe that the byzantine network of laws in America is making criminals of us all.

CNN’s lamely titled Insurgency on the Internet is actually a pretty good overview of the hacker (really, cracker) culture.

Action resumes in the Microsoft trial next week. The most interesting evidence of the final leg of the trial could come from IBM exec Garry Norris, who’s going to reveal the details from a diary that he kept of his negotiations with Microsoft over the years. He was deposed by Microsoft yesterday.