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When I previously read this post over at T. Longren’s, my initial thoughts was “WTF? Cohen doesn’t need the extra pain of having to deal with the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc.”. IMHO, he would be much better off just concentrating on advancing the technology, rather than the implementation.

It seems that Cohen has gone ahead with the plan anyway. You can play around with the search engine. However, when I tried it out, it seems to be stuck searching forever. Probably a result of the slashdotting.

By coincidence, or some freak chance, the next article on Slashdot highlights the FBI’s operation of shutting down a central web site used to coordinate all file-sharing activity on the (now defunct) Elite Torrents network.

The Xfce development team is glad to announce Xfce 4.2.2, a maintenance and bug fix release of Xfce 4.2 (current latest stable branch of Xfce). The changelog is available here.

As usual, source and binary packages are available from Xfce.org and all the usual mirrors. os-cillation will usually release the excellent Xfce installer for this version soon.

New gaim packages are available for Slackware 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, and -current to fix several security issues. Sites that use GAIM should upgrade to the new version.

Here are the details from the Slackware 10.1 ChangeLog:

+————————–+
patches/packages/gaim-1.3.0-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to gaim-1.3.0. This fixes a
few bugs which could be used by a remote attacker to annoy a GAIM user by
crashing GAIM and creating a denial of service.
(* Security fix *)
+————————–+

For others like me, who uses Slackware-current, the long awaited upgrade of glibc to include NPTL support is finally over! Read the Slackware-current changelog for more information. However, it will take a while for all mirrors to synch… so be patient.

You can upgrade necessary packages by manually downloading the packages. Or use automated updating tools such as Swaret or slapt-get.

As reported by C|Net and discussed on OSNews… the monopoly from Redmond has again, showed their acumen for illogical and exploitive business decisions.

However, to be fair to Microsoft, the press release for XP Starter Edition already contains the following information:

Starting in October 2004, Windows XP Starter Edition will ship on new, low-cost desktop PCs available through PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Microsoft OEM distributors in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Language versions will be available in Thai, Malay and Indonesian.

However, it would be kinda dumb to actually use a manufacturer-crippled OS when there are other perfectly viable alternatives available which are the real deal.

MozFo has released Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4. The release notes can be read here.