New & Noteworthy: Palm acquires Be; Palm lawsuit; SirCam still kicking; Firewalls; Quicken 2002; more

Palm acquires Be! A cnet.com article states: "Palm announced on Thursday that it is acquiring the technology assets and intellectual property of software maker Be for $11 million in stock, in a move aimed at strengthening its operating system to compete against Microsoft." A related article examines the history of Be, an OS that came very close to being the basis for Mac OS X

PDAs increasingly vulnerable to hackers A cnet.com article looks at the security risks to data on these handheld devices (which were never designed to be very secure in the first place).

Lawsuit against Palm re sync damage Last week, as reported by yahoo.com, "A California law firm has filed suit against Palm and its former parent company 3Com, claiming that a feature used to synchronize data between Palm's handheld computers and a PC can cause damage to PCs. This week, according to siliconvalley.com, what was "first dismissed as a nuisance lawsuit now has the potential to cause problems for the beleaguered maker of handheld computers." With a serial port damaged, a PC can be rendered unable to start up again. Assuming the allegation is true (which is far from clear as yet), even Macs would be vulnerable here.

SirCam still kicking A wired.com article notes that the SirCam virus/worm remains strong more than a month after its first appearance. Based on the infected email we still receive, we can confirm this.

Firewall protection in the limelight Time was, that to protect yourself while online, about the only thing most users needed was an anti-virus utility. Now, with the rise of broadband connections, firewall protection is getting equal billing. The subject was the focus of an article in the latest issue of Newsweek. It mentions both software (such as Norton Internet Security) and hardware (typically routers with firewall protection built in).

The article also mentions the Shields UP! site, where you can test the firewall vulnerability of your connection. It is designed for Windows users, but the main tests work for Mac users as well. We were amused by this note, following a test of our own connection: "All attempts to get any information from your computer have FAILED. (This is very uncommon for a Windows networking-based PC.)."

G4 800DP's arrive Thomas Armes (of Elite Computers & Software in Cupertino) writes: "We've received our first shipment of the new Power Mac G4 800DP Towers. Apple had originally told us it would be some time in September before we would see any of the 800DP's."

Apple's QuickTime Live! conference for developers will be held October 8-11 in Beverly Hills, California.

Graphire2 Wacom Technology has announced a new $99 Graphire2 cordless pen-and-mouse USB system. This is a second-generation of the input system that combines a cordless, no-ball scrolling mouse with a cordless and pressure-sensitive pen.

Quicken 2002 Following months of beta testing, Intuit has announced the shipping of a release version ofQuicken 2002 Deluxe 1.0. It will run in Mac OS 9 and X.

Mac OS 9.2.1 coming? We continue to hear rumors that a general release of Mac OS 9.2 (actually now upped to 9.2.1) is coming very soon.