We try to stick to online speech issues, but Banned Books Week is too important to skip. Libraries get as much flak from the internet as any book, so feel free to celebrate the week by visiting a banned website. And while CNN softballs the issue by sticking to Judy Blume and Anne Frank, the important question is who will stand up for the really controversial material. Thanks to Stradivarius for bringing this up.

Darren.Moffat writes "Seems like round 2 of the ISP war is about to start in the UK, The full story is online. " Quick Summary: For our readers who've never had to deal with metered calling, there's a running charge for /all/ calls, not just long distance (stupid, I know). But it appears that the two biggest British ISPs are now working with the phone companies to lower those rates. This could be a big breakthrough in the amount of time that Brits spend online.

Stephen Donner wrote to let us know that Netscape 4.7 is out and ready for download, albeit for UNIX/Macintosh systems. The FTP server is behaving like a slug so be patient. Here's to hoping that when I download it, it fixes some of these JavaScript "issues".

Greyfox asks "With the new /. system in place, I want to accept cookies from /., but I still don't care to get them from the rest of the Internet. Is it possible to set Netscape up to do this and if not is there some proxy server out there that will do it for me, perhaps filtering cookies from every site that's not on a list specified in a config file? "

Mur! asks: "Long distance carriers have been getting into the ISP business for a while. But recently Qwest has started a deal that, for $24.95/month, you not only get unlimited internet access (with no time limits or anything that seems to indicate you can't stay connected 24/7) but 250 minutes of domestic long distance to boot. But is it worth the hassle?" Sounds good right? But there's a catch. Hit the link for more.

In his new book, "Weaving the Web," Tim Berners-Lee describes how he created the WWW and his vision and hope for it. Any declarations from this brilliant and selfless man are important and worth paying attention to, but brace yourself: the writing style is somewhere between low-key and comatose, the vision noble but almost hopelessly naive.

cswiii writes "C|Net has this story about NCR suing Netscape over nine patents said to be infringed. " NCR is suing over nine patent infringements for "organizing and retrieving information from computer databases". We'll update this story as more details come out.

Pivo writes "Sure I'd rather use Linux, and sure, "Tru64" is a cheezy name for a Unix variant, but for some reason I'm not happy to hear that Compaq may not release Tru64 for Merced after all. Nothing has been confirmed by Compaq however." But, according to the article, Compaq will keep supporting Unix on Alphas.

routecoder asks: "X11 is great, but one of its significant disadvantages is its treatment of fonts. Netscape in X11 is frankly ugly, fonts are chunky, they scale poorly making some sites are hard to read. Are there any good tools available to make X prettier? If not, what would it take to build more asthetically pleasing font support?" This has always been one of the largest complaints about X11 that I've heard from many Microsoft supporters. Is XFree86 v4 going to address any of these issues? How substantial would changes need to be to make font support in X comparable to or better than that which is in Windows.

In the last week I have read (literally) over 1000 online attacks aimed at an alleged attempt by Unisys to make everyone who uses GIFs on a Web site pay $5000 in royalties. A story posted here on Slashdot Sunday helped fan those flames. But nowhere, in any of the many "Unisys is evil" posts I read, here or elsewhere, did I see a single official statement from anyone at Unisys, so I decided to call Unisys and get their take on the matter. (More below)

Samawi writes "Opera Software has issued this interview with cofounder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner. Highlights include screenshots, a new text only browser to compete with Lynx support for Free BSD and other variants of UNIX/X11 (using cross-platform features of Qt). I can't wait to retire good 'ol buggy and bloated Netscape:-) " Its a bit thin on the details, but its nice to know that its coming.

According to an Article in InfoWorld, HP will release next week a new family of thin client PCs. Out of the 3 models that they will release, 2 of them will be with an embedded Linux core (the L & X models, and the G model with MS Windows CE) and they'll include Netscape Navigator for browser-based access to Java programs as well as access to Windows applications. The X series also includes HP's ChaiVM embedded Java virtual machine, providing access to applications hosted on Unix and legacy servers.

DocSavage was the first to write with the news that The Linux Fund plans to offer a Linux credit card. Interesting-if they can get 100,000 subscribers, then they will have about 2 million dollars to throw at developers and projects.

SithLordBill writes "Looks like there will be another Quake3 test due in mid-September. This one will include single player bots as well as the Virtual Machine (written to interpret game mods). Anyway, Carmack will be releasing the VM and its modules (as well as the modified compiliers, LCC and q3asm) will be open-source as to give mod developers a head start. Check out his most recent .plan update -- there's a bunch of cool stuff there. "

Lots of readers pointed us to this Microsoft.com page that says MS has stopped trying to make NT run on 64-bit Alphas and isn't even going to release any new 32-bit Alpha products. For more info on the subject, check this Netcape Netcenter article and the Ixnay WinNT on Alphastory we ran last Friday. Meanwhile, according to a short blurb in The Register, Intel has finally prototyped Merced in silicon - and it runs Linux fine but won't run Win64 at all. It looks like Microsoft simply can't deal with 64-bit architecture. Please try not to say "I told you so" too loudly to your MS-boosting coworkers, okay? ;-)

lazlo gave us the heads-up-SCO is going to be offering Linux support now, in an attempt to boost revenue. It's funny how much things can change in only a few months.

Eric Krock writes "The Web Standards Project has launched a petition drive to pressure Microsoft to fully support HTML 4.0, CSS1, DOM1, and XML in IE." Like it or not, IE is currently the most widely-used WWW browser. Since Microsoft is under a lot of pressure to act (or at least pretend to act) nice nowadays, a large number of polite requests to make their browser products fully support current and future W3C standards just might do some good.

sysadmn writes "This web server is the latest contender for "World's Smallest". Two chips and a diode - so they had to leave out Linux :-). It's based on the world's smallest implementation of a TCP/IP stack -- which is implmented on a small 8-pin low-power microcontroller using 512 words of program ROM. Where would you put a $1 web server? " If its real, its amazing.

Tsu writes "Well, our good friends over at the Win2K Test Site have, unsurprisingly, stolen an idea from the competition: they've released their Administrator password. Meanwhile, the linuxppc people now have a guestbook up. "

Stewart Rosenberger has written an interesting piece about what the success of Linux means for the users out there who are currently using it. Will it mean that the pioneers will move on to other places? Is this already starting-rather then Linux fragmenting, the user base fragmenting? Click below to read more-it's well worth it.