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The press calls him a “nearly seventeen-year-old” and he’s reported to be one of the people behind the malware used to compromise credit card data at Target and other locations. He lives in Russia and is said to be the author of the BlackPOS malware that was used against Target and might have been used against Neiman Marcus.

On Friday, Roy Schestowitz posted an article on Techrights which seems to accuse Red Hat of being in cahoots with the NSA. According to the article, the company has been building back doors into RHEL for the spy agency. However, the article appears to be long on accusations and short on proof.

Back in November, the popular open source image editing program GIMP ended their association with SourceForge and dropped the site as it’s host. Since that time, downloads of GIMP have no longer been available on the site but have been moved to the GIMP’s website.

Kano began raising funds in December of 2013. Their goal was to raise $100,000 to expand their ability to manufacture and sell a kit that not only taught kids how to use a computer, but how to build one and how to write code to use on that computer as well. It’s designed to fire the interest and imagination of future Anita Borgs and Linus Torvalds.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a patent case between online retailer Newegg and patent troll Soverain Software. The case involved three patents held by Soverain dealing with online shopping carts. Newegg, which has vowed to fight all software patent cases, initially lost in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is infamous for favoring plaintiffs in patent cases. However, Newegg went on to score a victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled all three patents invalid because they were obvious.

This is a trend with the potential to eventually change hardware as radically as the various open source licenses have changed software. Indeed, it’s already making changes — and the concept isn’t just being adopted by small startups either.

The returned call she promised was as icy and distant as our initial meeting had been warm and cordial. She informed me that her director of IT strongly recommended against such a change. What it all boiled down to was his statement that:

“It might even be illegal for us to remove Microsoft Office or Windows from previously purchased computers, due to the vendor agreement the school district signed with Microsoft.”

The acid test was not how much we liked it but on whether our Reglue Kids liked it. Working with a small sampling of 14 installations and different partition boot options, we gauged how well our KDE version did when compared against GNOME 3/GNOME Shell and Cinnamon. Each one of the 14 kids were asked to use all three environments and give us some feedback.

Since the Snowden leaks revealed that Microsoft has allegedly built back doors into Windows for the NSA, we’ve been saying that the spy agency’s actions are going to hurt the U.S. tech industry’s business abroad. Well, it’s started to happen. On Thursday, Reuters reported that India has decided to drop out of a planned partnership with Google designed to help voters access information.

Firefox OS has a couple of things going for it that the competition lacks. For one, it’s completely open, much more open than iOS and even more open than Android and Chrome. For two, it’s completely based on HTML5.

I wanted to be able to tell you that despite rollApp being in beta it’s pretty much ready to go. Unfortunately, I can’t, because it isn’t. There are some limitations that make using the site a deal breaker for most users. When the developers get those worked out, however, rollApp will be ready to be a major player in the world of online apps.

It’s been my experience that Redmond is loath to give away anything. But since the Android phone and tablet rampage, Microsoft is desperately looking for ways to catch up in the mobile sector. So what do they intend on doing? Well, they decided it might be a good idea to give away Windows Phone and Windows RT systems for free. They see this as a sure-fire way to combat Google’s hold on the mobile market.

Now that companies are closing-out their books on the old year, it’s becoming evident that Linux devices were a big hit in 2013.

On Friday, CNET’s Brooke Crothers reported that Chromebooks, those nifty laptops running Google’s Chrome OS that let the cloud do the heavy lifting, accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year. As impressive as that may be, the numbers get even better when Android tablets are added to the mix. According to market research company NPD Group, January to November saw 1.76 million Chromebooks and Android tablets sold, up from only 400,000 during all of 2012.

This wasn’t the first time he had problems with his dad and his dad’s computer. It’s been a running gun battle between the two for quite a while. Nick is a Linux guy, but even with his dual degrees and six figure job, he can’t talk his dad into switching from Windows. He has put every safeguard on the computer he could and his dad still finds a way to mess it up. Mostly it’s from “games of chance” sites that he seems to enjoy visiting.

The biggest story to come down the wire this year ubdoubtedly had to do with Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s bag of dirty tricks. Even those of us who have long understood that the Internet isn’t necessarily a place to expect privacy were suprised at how deeply the NSA has managed to reach into the Internet. Odds are, if you’ve been using social networks, everything you’ve posted is now on file with the NSA. What’s worse, every email you’ve sent probably has a copy resting on a NSA server somewhere.

The last time I looked into my crystal ball, it told me to proceed with extreme caution if I invested in Google. Their business model was shaky at best. Needless to say, said crystal ball and I have parted company.

There’s plenty about Rockstar vs Everybody Android to remind me of the SCO fiasco. Enough so to make me wish we still had PJ and Groklaw to take care of the play-by-play. Last week, Google returned fire. Wouldn’t it be nice to have PJ’s take on this?

First the good news. According to security company Websense, the amount of phishing attempts we’re finding in our email dropped remarkably this year, from 1.12% of all email volume down to 0.5%. Now, the bad news. The folks doing the phishing are getting better at targeting their attempts, so they don’t need to send as many emails to hook their prey.

What were the ten best stories we published on FOSS Force this year? Well, that would depend on a lot of things, wouldn't it, such as who's asking? We could tell you what we think our ten best stories were this year, but we'll hold that until next week. Today we're going to look at the ten stories that got the most reads on our site this year.

Since 2005, with the exception of last year, I have “worked” every Christmas day. I accentuate “worked” because I am lucky enough to have a job that feels more like a hobby than it does labor. I give computers to kids who cannot afford them. What’s not to like? I plan to work some of Christmas morning this year too.