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Sun claims Kevin Mitnick inflicted 80 million dollars damage to the company when he stole the source code to Solaris (Sun’s flagship operating system). Now it turns out that Sun is giving away the same source code to certain parties for $100. This is amazingly similar to the Craig Neidorf (better known to Phrack readers as Knight Lightning) case from a few years ago, in which BellSouth accused Neidorf of publishing some E911 system documentation worth $80,000. In trial, the defense presented proof that more extensive documentation could be ordered from BellSouth for $13 by any member of the public who knew where to get the catalog. At that point, the case against Neidorf fell apart. It will be interesting to see whether the outcome is any different here. (By the way, Mike Godwin, the author of the EFF article I linked to, has left the EFF. In many ways, this marks the end of an era.) ...

I haven’t seen the Star Wars movie yet. I’m not supposed to go see it until I finish the book, but I may give in and go see it next weekend. If you’re keeping score at home, two webloggers have given the movie positive reviews, and one has given it a negative review (that I’ve seen). I haven’t actually read any of the reviews yet, because I don’t want to be exposed to any potential spoilers. As most of America will have seen it before Monday, every day I hold out exposes me to greater risk. ...

http://www.notsobighouse.com offers an interesting alternative to conspicuous consumption. Now what we need is notsogasguzzlingcar.com and notmoreinterestedindaytradingthandoingwork.com. In his wrapup of events in the “open source” software world, Andrew Leonard discusses the controversy surrounding the term “open source” itself. Apparently, two groups are arguing over which one owns the trademark for the name. Ironic isn’t it? Microsoft has formed a group internally to counter Linux. What’s the matter? Afraid of a few sleep deprived college students and European hackers? If Microsoft had real guts, they’d be working with Linux instead of trying to kill it. It would be foolish to expect any kind of leadership from Microsoft though; they really don’t care about the industry, other than as a group of competitors they have crushed or will crush. ...

http://www.hel13.com … it’s no jodi.org. It looks like George Bush, Jr. can’t take a joke. Bush’s attorneys are trying to get the Federal Election Commission to force the guy who runs the spoof site to register as a political committee or take the site down. How about the third option, just hosting it in another country? By the way, how many people would have heard of http://www.gwbush.com if Bush’s henchmen didn’t make a stink about it? ...

Adam Engst has more tips for email etiquette in TidBits this week. CVS Web is a tool for … publishing CVS repositories on the Web. FreeBSD 3.2 was released on Monday. linux.com launched this evening. The site looks great, congratulations to all involved.

Netscape Communicator 4.6 has been posted to Netscape’s FTP servers, and the inevitable backlash has already begun in the public Mozilla newsgroups. People are unhappy that Netscape is doing any work at all on the existing codebase when the developers could be working on Mozilla. It’s amazing how myopic some of the people in the Open Source community are. Why do people think that version 2.0.37 of the Linux kernel was released even though 2.2 was almost out the door? You have to support your existing software while you create new versions if you want to keep your users happy at all. I imagine that there will be plenty of people who stick with version 4.x of the Netscape browser long after Mozilla has been released (and it’s going to be quite some time until Mozilla is released anyway). By the way, international users will be happy to know that the major change between 4.5 and 4.6 is that 56 bit encryption is supported instead of 40 bit now. ...

In the wee hours of the morning, I did something very strange. I created HTML using a WYSIWYG editor (Netscape Composer). I needed to create an outline of the table of contents for my book, and instead of hand coding it, I just typed it into Netscape Composer. Creating HTML using something other than a raw text editor or a program that I wrote myself is very strange to me, but I suppose I could learn to like it for small tasks. ...

The Hubble space telescope is finding “gravitational lenses” that were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1936. Amazing stuff. To reach the pinnacle of geekdom, one must become a Unix hater, not because Unix confusing or hard to use, but because it’s technically inferior to other operating systems that came before it. I have not yet attained this level of consciousness. I probably never will. Do you need to settle one of those barroom debates about Internet standards that you’re always having? Check out the nice library of RFCs maintained by Ohio State University. ...

There’s very big news in the open source world today, as O’Reilly has launched Sourcexchange, a service which will allow companies to submit software projects for bidding by open source developers. The winning bidder will write the code, some independent group will “peer review” the code, and then the developers will be paid the amount of the bid. The catch is that the code has to be released under an open source license after the project is complete. This could be an incredibly interesting development in the computer industry. Andrew Leonard has the story over at Salon. ...

I found a useful online manual for CVS tonight. Here’s a page explaining how to make secure CVS connections using SSH.