More DDOS fun. David Dittrich analyzes the various DDOS tools available: Trinoo, Tribal Flood Network, and Stacheldraht. Aleph One, the moderator of Bugtraq, posted a pretty good rundown of what system administrators can do about these attacks today.

The Art of Unix Programming is ESR’s attempt to write a book on Unix programming with community support. The book is being published on the Web as it is being written, and will hopefully be published once it is complete.

Salon is going to launch a free software site to promote Andrew Leonard’s new book. I also see this as a potential K-Tel maneuver … the word Linux appears in their press release about a dozen times.

Kerbango is producing an Internet radio. It looks really cool, hopefully it’s not too ahead of its time. (By the way, it’s another Linux device.)

Salon also has a roundup of the coverage of the DOS attacks today. I’ll summarize the Salon story in one sentence: Nobody knows anything but that doesn’t stop people from pretending like they do. Scott Rosenberg also has a column on the attacks, and it says everything I’d like to say, only better.

It’s all Netscape all the time at Salon today. Andrew Leonard waves the Mozilla flag in a short article about the current status of the Mozilla project, and he also has an article about Netscape hacker emeritus Jamie Zawinski.

I had no idea that the Tivo personal TV receivers run Linux. That’s really, really cool. Not to go all Jakob Nielsen on you, but in fact, it bears out a prediction I made awhile back.

I love unintended consequences. Rodney Smolla, a first amendment scholar, felt so strongly that the book Hit Man should not be sold that he sued Paladin Press and won a multimillion dollar settlement under which Paladin Press also agreed to take the book off the market. Now, it’s available for free download over the Web. Isn’t it funny how things work out?

Salon is running an article by C. Scott Ananian today that offers a status report on the legal activity surrounding DeCSS and a manifesto as well! Seriously, though, the actions of the MPAA in the DeCSS case are incredibly frightening. The issue here is clear, the MPAA doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s rights if they believe that those rights stand between them and their profits.

The RIAA has started a campaign called Soundbyting to tell college students that trading MP3s is illegal. Do these sorts of fancily packaged campaigns ever work? Cable companies have been telling people that stealing cable is illegal for years. Does that make people stop stealing cable? I’m genuinely curious because it seems to me that people who trade MP3s or steal cable already know that their actions are illegal. They just don’t care.