Justin Jenkins

While not exactly the freshest news (due to some things we at BetaNews will announce shortly), the Canadian government has opened a 90-day public comment period this week on whether or not the government should legalize cell phone jamming technology. Such technology could be used in movie theaters or restaurants. The blocking could be based in the on-board software of the phone, or by physical jamming devices on the premises. This could also block important emergency calls or the like. We at BetaNews are interested in hearing you thoughts on the matter, as this could soon be coming our way.

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It seems ICQ has posted a link on their Web site's front page that reads "Banners on ICQ Messages?! Voice your opinion here!" It includes a link to a message board on ICQ's Web site as well as a link to the BetaNews article and forum. Make your voice heard and tell us what you think about the addition of banner ads to ICQ messages.

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A number of readers sent in that Opera Software today released Opera 5.0 for Windows, as well as making its Web browser available for free. Though it is now free if you choose the "sponsor supported version," its hope is to re-ignite Browser War in "full force as a third player" besides AOL’s Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Download it from opera’s website and give it a try, It’s available for BeOS, EPOC, Linux, Mac and Windows.

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Zope version 2.2.4 is now available, Zope is the leading Open Source web application server. It enables teams to collaborate in the creation and management of dynamic web-based business applications such as intranets and portals. Zope makes it easy to build features such as site search, news, personalization, and e-commerce into your web applications. Read more about the latest release here. This bug-fix release contains the fixes for all released Hotfixes to date.

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This month Microsoft’s latest incarnation of Office hits the store shelves, but don’t get too excited it’s gonna be for Macintosh. Office:mac 2001 as it has been rebranded, repackaged, and updated with new Mac-only features, it's designed specifically for anyone with a PowerPC-enabled Mac.

"Mac users are unique users," explains Microsoft Group Product Manager Mary Rose Becker “They want things to act differently, feel differently and look differently.

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In other Linux news, it seems that Linux creator Linus Torvalds is planning to write his autobiography. The memoirs promise an "inside look" at the open-source revolution and how Torvalds thinks it was "purely accidental." HarperBusiness, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, said that it plans to publish the book, entitled Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary in the spring of 2001.

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For you users of Red Hat 7 a patch is now available to update from the Beta version of the glibc 2.2 library to the official, and final version. This has caused some users problems as this was not fully tested beta software. The glibc library is the GNU C library that allows many Unix programs written in that langue run, this package updates the GNU C library to 2.2 and fixes several bugs found in glibc 2.1.92-14 and 2.1.94-3 releases.

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Microsoft has posted a little Q & A on FrontPage 10, that is currently in Beta 2. check out the article on Microsoft’s site.
It covers a small range of new features and addresses what Microsoft doing to better serve the needs of this changing market.

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Microsoft today officially denied it held a monopoly or violated antitrust law, and it asked a federal appeals court to throw out a lower court ruling that seeks to separate the company.
In a 150-page brief submitted prior to oral arguments set for February, Microsoft said District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled inaccurately that Microsoft’s business practices were anti-competitive.

"Far from violating the antitrust laws, Microsoft's conduct was pro-competitive, producing enormous consumer benefits," the company filed in its brief.

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We would like to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, and extend our thanks for your continued support to BetaNews! We will all be with our families today, as we hope you are. Don't forget to pass the stuffing to Grandma and make sure to count, and recount all of your blessings! We look forward to some continued improvements to BetaNews, and hopefully some additional reporters as well. Save some room for pumpkin pie, and have a great holiday!

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FreeBSD fans should be starting up the wave, as a new version of FreeBSD, 4.2-RELEASE, is now available! There is not a slew of new features in this release but many bugs were fixed, important security issues were dealt with, and a conservative number of new features have been added. See the release notes for more information. You can download ISOs for i386 and Alpha or just visit the FTP server and browse.

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Well if you tried downloading PHP 4.0.3, you will notice that the version has been changed to 4.0.3pl1 (Patch Level 1). Due to a memory leak in the module versions of PHP and a separate issues with the Apache php_value mechanism not working properly with .conf files. As this effected only the non-CGI version of PHP there is no need to upgrade if you use CGI-PHP. Download the source here.

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The Washington Post is reporting that attorneys at the Federal Trade Commission are busily preparing court documents in hopes of blocking America Online's takeover of Time Warner. The two sides "remain apart on the exact language of a guarantee allowing rivals access to the combined company's high-speed Internet service." See the article for more, and keep checking back for more updates on the AOL-Time Warner merger.

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Zeev Suraski sent word that PHP 4.0.3 has been released. As this is mostly a security-oriented
maintenance release, it is therefore strongly recommended for all users of
PHP to upgrade to it. As well the Win32 version has been beefed up with a lot of
loadable modules. Download the source
or the Win32 binaries.

11 Oct 2000, Version 4.0.3 - Fixed a possible crash in -a interactive mode (Zeev, Zend Engine) - Added mysql_escape_string() (Peter A. Savitch and & Brian Wang) - Fixed many possible crash bugs with improper use of the printf() family of functions (Andi) - Fixed a problem that allowed users to override admin_value's and admin_flag's (Zeev) - Fixed PostgreSQL module to work when the link handle is omitted (Zeev) - Fixed returning of empty LOB fields in OCI8. (Thies) - Added Calendar module to default Win32 build (Andi) - Added FTP module to default Win32 build (Andi) - Fixed crash in the POSIX getrlimit() function ([email protected]) - Fixed dirname() under certain conditions (Andi) - Added --with-imap-ssl to support SSL'ized imap library in RH7 and others (Rasmus) - Fixed possible crash bug in parse_url() (Andi) - Added support for trans sid under Win32 (Daniel) - IPv6 support in fopen (Stig Venaas) - Added the shmop extension. It allows more general ways of shared memory access. (thanks to Ilia Alshanestky and Slava Poliakov (Derick) - Added the ability for CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS to accept an associative array of HTTP POST variables and values. (Sterling) - Added the CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option to curl_setopt(). (Sterling) - Added the curl_error() and curl_errno() functions. (Sterling) - Changed ext/db not to be enabled by default (Jani) - Fixed building Apache SAPI module on SCO UnixWare (Sascha) - Fixed writing empty session sets to shared memory ([email protected]) - Added support for BSD/OS make (Sascha) - Added improved URL rewriter (Sascha) - Fixed readdir_r() use on Solaris (Sascha) - Improved HTTP headers for private-caching ([email protected], Sascha) - Added new function session_cache_limiter ([email protected], Sascha) - Added ftp_exec to the ftp functions (thanks to ) (Derick) - PEAR: add last executed query as debug info in DB errors (Stig) - PEAR: allow multiple modes in PEAR_Error (Stig) - Made the Sybase CT module thread safe (Zeev) - Added second argument to array_reverse() that indicatese whether the original array keys should be preserved. (Andrei) - Clean up htmlspecialchars/htmlentities inconsistencies. (Rasmus) - PEAR: renamed DB_GETMODE_* to DB_FETCHMODE_*, added setFetchMode() in DB_common to set the default mode, added some MySQL tests (Stig) - Made eval() and several other runtime-evaluated code portions report the nature and location of errors more accurately (Stas) - Added an optional parameter to wordwrap that cuts a string if the length of a word is longer than the maximum allowed. (Derick) - Added functions pg_put_line and pg_end_copy (Dirk Elmendorf) - Added second parameter for parse_str to save result (John Bafford) - Fixed bug with curl places extra data in the output. ([email protected]) - Added the pathinfo() function. (Sterling) - Updated sybase_ct module and its sybase_query to use high performance API. (Joey) - Added a more configurable error reporting interface to DB. (Stig) - Added is_uploaded_file() and move_uploaded_file() (Zeev) - Added several directives to php.ini - post_max_size, file_uploads, display_startup_errors - see php.ini-dist for further information (Zeev) - Worked around a bug in the libc5 implementation of readdir() (Stas) - Fixed some potential OpenBSD and NetBSD crash bugs when opening files. (Andi) - Added EscapeShellArg() function (Rasmus) - Added a php.ini option session.use_trans_sid to enable/disable trans-sid. (Sterling) - Added the Sablotron extension for XSL parsing. (Sterling) - Fixed a bug in checkdate() which caused < 1 years to be valid (Jani) - Added support for an optional output handler function for output buffering. This enables transparent rendering of XML through XSL, transparent compression, etc. (Zeev) - Added support for user defined 'tick' callback functions. This helps emulate background processing. (Andrei) - Fixed problem with having $this as the XML parser object. (Andrei) - Internal opened_path variable now uses the Zend memory manager so that full paths of files won't leak on unclean shutdown (Andi) - Removed support of print $obj automatically calling the __string_value() method. Instead define yourself a method such as toString() and use print $obj->toString() (Andi, Zend Engine)

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Jordan K. Hubbard, of the FreeBSD project announced this morning that FreeBSD 4.1.1-RELEASE is now available. Since the release of 4.1, the RSA has released their code into the public domain and a number of other security enhancements were made possible through the FreeBSD project's permission to export cryptographic code from the United States. These changes were all rolled into 4.1.1-RELEASE making it one of the most secure "out of the box" releases of FreeBSD ever completed.

The FreeBSD crew also took the opportunity to include support for new features
like IDE ATA100 support, drivers for additional Gigabit Ethernet cards and hardware watchpoints in gdb.

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