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Reuters reported on Monday that the search company has agreed to pony-up $17 million in order to settle a claim by 37 states and the District of Colombia that it had secretly tracked users of smartphones by purposefully circumventing web browser protections. This was after the firm had already reached a $22 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in August of last year in a case related to the same activity.

MARSHALL,TX—"Imagine you're sitting at home minding your own business," said Newegg lawyer Kent Baldauf in opening statements earlier this week. "Someone knocks on your door and tells you—or demands from you—millions of dollars for a service that you're already paying someone else for."

Imagine the service is cable television and that you're already paying the cable company. "But this person tells you, 'We own a patent on cable TV, and you owe us too for all the years you've been watching cable TV,'" Baldauf continued. "Then you look into it, and you find out, wait a minute, this patent really doesn't cover what they say it covers. What would you do? My guess is you [would] do exactly what Newegg has done here. You would say: That's not right. I want my day in court."

I have created this petition because there are a lot of problems with your hardware on Linux that are frustrating, time-wasting, and distracting.

And, yes, the patent (which has since expired) is highly questionable in the first place. While Spangenberg's lawyers (representing his shell company called TQP) tried to claim that the inventor, Michael Jones, was some sort of visionary genius who predicted the world of e-commerce, there's no actual evidence to support this. Newegg (thankfully) has famed cryptography expert Whitfield Diffie on hand to call bullshit on the claims that Jones (a) invented anything special or (b) that his invention is even remotely in use on e-commerce sites today. Diffie, of course, is one of the inventors of public key cryptography, which happened prior to Jones' invention, and is what is actually used online.

Today we are announcing the release of Black Lab Linux 4.1.8. This is the inaugural release of Black Lab Linux since we had to rename our distribution from OS/4 OpenLinux to Black Lab Linux. With the new release of Black Lab Linux 4.1.8 what are some of the changes that have been implemented.

Francis Gurry, the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization, seems to be running from scandal to scandal these days. While it has shown brief moments of enlightenment, for the most part, WIPO tends to be an organization very supportive of the copyright and patent maximalist agenda. Last year, we wrote about two incredible scandals that directly involved Gurry. Despite WIPO being a part of the UN, Gurry apparently defied UN sanctions against both North Korea and Iran to give them computers, in the wacky belief that those countries would use the computers to bolster their local patent system.

My personal blog is run with the Perl-based Ode system. Ode doesn’t use a database. Instead it stores its entries as text files in “normal” directories on the server. I wanted to have exact copies of everything in my Ode documents directory on my local computer and the server. And I wanted the freedom to add to or modify anything in this directory on either side (server or laptop) and have everything track on both machines.

Today in Open Source: 64-bit Android ready to roll on Intel processors. Plus: Linux and kids, and Nintendo experiments with Android.

Hundreds of millions of users around the world freely benefit from Mozilla technologies, including Mozilla's open-source Firefox Web browser, but that doesn't mean Mozilla isn't making any money. Mozilla announced its 2012 earnings this week, reporting record revenue of $311 million. That figure is a far cry from where Mozilla started.

Canonical is getting ready to introduce a new icon theme for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) that will be the same across all platforms.

The latest bi-weekly Wine development release is available.

Containers and KVM and cloud – oh my! Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 has reached general availability following a six-week beta period, making it the first minor release of RHEL 6 to ship since version 6.4 in February.

We’re always bemoaning the injustices in the world, but when given the opportunity to help one child, one time, no one seizes the opportunity because “I don’t know any poor people?” Take my word for it — poor people won’t be that hard to find.

We scoured the web for some of this week's most interesting open source-related news stories so you don't have to. Here's what we found..

Calibre is the best software to manage your ebooks and to convert them from one format into another, but it lacked any real integration with the operating system. This can now be changed with the Unity Calibre Scope, in Ubuntu 13.10.

Google is working on a webbified development to build the “next generation” of Chrome Apps. One of the search titan’s employees has revealed the existence of a Chrome App-based development environment codenamed Spark.

x9wm Linux 2013-11-12 is available. x9wm Linux is a vanilla debian 32-bit/64bit i386 686-pae/AMD64 kernel build on Wheezy the Stable Debian Channel complete with over 300 installed applications including GIMP, LibreOffice, OpenShot Video Editor, GUVC WebCam,EtherApe, Aterm-Transparent terminal, LeafPad, RecordMyDesktop, Google-Chrome w/FLASH latest, FireFox, xpdf, atop, htop, xcalc, many fonts, gparted , SSHuttle, VLC, mplayer, 1-click to any of your favorite sites and a whole lot more.

Once thought of as outdated art forms, animated GIF images have now come back. If you haven't noticed, quite a few online sharing and social networking sites are now supporting animated GIF images, for example, on Tumblr, Flickr, Google+, and partly on Facebook. Due to their ease of consumption and sharing, GIF-ed animations are now part of mainstream Internet culture. This tutorial describes how to convert a video file to an animated GIF image on Linux.

It seems easier to accept that it has been a half century since JFK was murdered than that most people now alive were then yet to be born.

Mozilla, the open-source Web browser group behind Firefox, doesn't appear to have much to do with Google until you look at the bottom line. There, you'll find that 90 percent of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google.