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In early September when the page was first removed, supposedly for “spamming,” Mr Kruse seemed confident the issue would be resolved and the page would eventually again be operational. As of yesterday, however, the page has completely disappeared. Visitors who attempt to visit the site are greeted with the notice: “Sorry, this page isn’t available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”

Just because software is free doesn’t mean it’s free software.

This may confuse those who only know the Windows world, where the software animal known as “freeware” is readily available but truly free software is a bit more scarce. They may be excused for thinking, when we Linux users talk about “free software,” that they use free software too. After all, doesn’t a free antivirus program qualify as free software? Or what about that gee-whiz free password manager that’ll generate and store five or six passwords–more if the “pro” version is purchased?

Social Fixer, a plugin that works with most browsers, allows users to change how their Facebook newsfeed and other pages are displayed and how they operate. Although very popular, the extension has always been a thorn in Facebook’s side. It’s not surprising that Zuckerberg and his minions would now find even less to like about the plugin, since Wall Street has been prodding them to get serious about monetizing the massive amount of traffic that flows through the social network.

The main reason I don’t usually pay any attention to these discussions on choice, however, is that I’m already firmly rooted in the camp that supports choice. Of course there are a gazillian distros. That’s the Linux gene pool. It’s a strength that helps keep Linux healthy and what keeps the operating system from being a one-size-fits-all solution that actually fits no one (like, say, Windows).

Today we are announcing the winner from a field of ten great blogs, all of which have already won our elimination round. Before that there were 19 truly great blogs in our competition, nine of which had been chosen by visitors to our site, the other ten being hand-picked by us here at FOSS Force as a way of getting things going. They are all winners just by dint of being in the running.

This really is a horse race now, with ten great blogs at the starting gate to determine who gets the bragging rights to claim the FOSS Force Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog–2013 prize. Unfortunately, more than a few really great blogs that were in the running in the second round of our competition are, sadly, now gone. Oh well, that’s the way it goes. Sometimes really good horses fail to win, place or show.

The good news is, we found plenty of great new blogs and we’ve now reached the second round in our vote. We’ve ended up with ten additional blogs to consider, in addition to the nine that were already on our list. That means voters now have a field of 19 blogs from which to choose. As with the first qualifying round, you can vote for one or two blogs. Because this is an elimination round and not a qualifying round, however, there is no longer any way to add a new blog for consideration. As Flip Wilson’s Geraldine used to say, “What you see is what you get.”

We are especially keen on Froman’s feigned concern for the proposed ban’s “effect on U.S. consumers.” Evidently studies have been done that have proved that the American psyche would be irrevocably damaged if we couldn’t buy old, outdated versions of Apple products. Oh, did we forget to tell you that this ban is on Apple devices that are all at least a year old?

Although the TOR Project’s policies might have left the door open to allow this sort of security breach to happen, that in no way excuses those who took advantage of a situation to execute this exploit. Nor does the fact that the malware installed on TOR users’ computers did no harm other than calling home with an identification report make make this any less of a cybercrime.

If you're new to the world of tech freedom, TOR is supposed to be a safe zone, a sanctuary. Among other things, it offers a way to surf anonymously. Governments hate it because the bad guys can use it as a way to evade detection. Digital freedom fighters like it for the same reason.

We’ve grown used to seeing demonstrations of computer tech in these police proceedurals, but rarely anything that looks so obviously like a commercial. In all instances, the camera lingers on a shot of the GUI formerly known as Metro. In some cases we see Skype being used, with the brand conspicously evident. In others, we get treated to watching a handheld tablet turn into something resembling a laptop, perhaps a netbook, when the device is connected with it’s cover keyboard. Wow! Microsoft magic at work.

A review of the week's biggest stories in the world of FOSS.

Your answers also showed us just how diverse the readership here is. Not only did we see a lot of you offering up the usual suspects, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora, we also got reminders of Linux’s rich history. It was somewhat gratifying to discover that some who visit here first tried Linux using long gone but not forgotten distros such as Yggdrasil and Soft Landing System.

For too long, we’ve been sitting around wringing our hands, sometimes proclaiming this to finally be the year of the Linux desktop without doing anything to make it happen and sometimes bemoaning the fact that the world still hasn’t discovered Linux as the secret to computing happiness. The thing is, the world never knows anything about secrets until they’re not secret anymore. We’ve been wanting Linux to just “catch on,” while we’ve been blaming the OEMs for not automatically pushing our home grown geek-centric distros with the same elan they put behind their bread and butter Windows.

It’s beginning to look as if the naysayers are right about Mark Shuttleworth’s hopes to raise $32 million to produce about 40,000 Ubuntu Edge devices. It ain’t going to happen, unless he manages to pull another rabbit out of the hat. Right now, his Indiegogo campaign is stalled at a little over $7 million, where it’s been for several days.

The race has begun. You get to decide which FOSS and Linux blog gets the honor of being the first ever winner of the FOSS Force “Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog.” The nomination process starts now with our qualifying poll.

A roundup of the major stories this week in the world of FOSS.

At the Def Con hacker conference early next month, O’Connor, a security researcher who runs the consultancy Malice Afterthought, plans to unveil Creepy Distributed Object Locator or CreepyDOL, a system of Linux computers that cost less than $60 each and are designed to be hidden around an urban or suburban area. The little black boxes can wirelessly track the movements of cell phones or other mobile devices, feeding the information they collect into a database where an administrator can monitor targets on a map-based interface. A proof-of-concept version of the system that O’Connor has built includes ten of the spy nodes, each capable of reading the wireless signals of nearby devices and communicating back to a central server by piggybacking on any available Wifi network.

This is good for us on the penguin farm. It only strengthens our argument that Linux is more secure than the other brands. In Linux, there are no secret back doors. Your computer won’t secretly call it’s handlers at the NSA to file a report on you. If you’re really paranoid and don’t trust the binaries supplied by your distro, afraid they’ve slipped in something nefarious that’s not in the code you’ve seen, go ahead and compile from source. It’ll be a lot of work, but if it makes you sleep better at night, go for it.

The IAB wants you to know that if you don’t let online advertisers follow you around when you’re surfing, then you’re scum, a criminal and probably a traitor to your country. At least, that would seem to be the thick of it from reading their latest in a series of diatribes against Mozilla published last Tuesday on their website under the heading “Has Mozilla Lost Its Values?”.