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Having already arrived pretty late to the 'freedom is important party' to make threats it cannot actually follow through without committing commercial suicide, Google now discovers that kicking China in the Android nuts is a Steve Martin/Iron Balls McGinty scenario.

Web applications are going to be big in 2010 and Microsoft is working on a new browser to run them.

Oh dear. After the debacle with Microsoft Poland’s apparent racist photoshopping, Microsoft China went and got the company in hot water for allegedly “stealing” code. Yes you read that right: Microsoft and wholesale “theft” of code from another website. Of course it’s not “theft” it’s copyright infringement but tomayto/tomarto. Microsoft confessed blaming a vendor they had worked with. No surprise really but the damage to their name may have already been done. There’s more to discuss here than Microsoft’s already tarnished reputation though. The issue raises some important points in favour of free software and points to why more if not all code should benefit from free licencing. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Customizing and theming, or "skinning", your open source browser is about to get easier, thanks to the integration of Personas in the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 release. The Personas engine, which enables users to easily change the way the browser looks, had previously been available as a Firefox add-on, but will soon become part of the default browser itself. Other popular Firefox add-ons, including Weave and Prism might one day follow suit, as well as a new technology for add-ons called Jetpacks, Mozilla said.

CompTIA — a large association serving the IT channel — has longstanding relationships with Microsoft and the traditional software industry. But one of CompTIA’s new board members could help to drive open source solutions across the IT channel. Here’s the scoop.

The schemes commonly used to encrypt GSM telephone calls, SMS messages, and data transmissions have been theoretically broken for years at both the protocol and cipher levels, but results presented in Berlin at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) on December 27 demonstrate that a practical attack can be easily implemented. Researchers unveiled cracking tables requiring just two terabytes of disk space that can be used to look up a GSM encryption key and decrypt a transmission. The tables were computed on 40 commodity hardware PC nodes in just a few months' time, and are shared through Bittorrent. Furthermore, the presentation explains that the more difficult practical task of intercepting and capturing GSM calls can already be done with inexpensive radio equipment and open source software.

Linux.com launched a Linux job board with lots of non-Linux jobs on it. What up with that?

Mozilla Labs has rolled out a major update to Bespin, an open source text editing engine that is built with standards-based Web technologies. The project has undergone a "reboot" with the aim of improving the ease with which it can be used and enhanced. Bespin 0.6, codenamed Ash, reflects the significant effort that went into the architectural overhaul. The code is more modular and is designed so that virtually all of the core functionality is implemented in plugins. The developers have also made it considerably easier to embed Bespin in webpages, an improvement that will lower the barriers to adoption.

The ASV Roboat has made a name for itself in many robotic sailboat competitions, and now a real research project is in store for the Linux-powered vessel.

"The fundamental purpose of the ICMP protocol is to report problems with the delivery of IP datagrams", says networking expert Swayam Prakasha. Join him in his latest article designed to help you discover more about one of the most popular protocols in the TPCG/IP suite…

Terminator 0.90 (branch named Epic Refactor) work is still in progress, but I've tried the latest bzr today (alpha 1) and except some limitations (see below), everything seems to be working fine.

According to the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog, Oracle and Sun expect that the European Commission will approve the acquisition of Sun Microsystems some time this week. The report which cites sources close to both companies, comes as the 27th of January deadline for the Commission's decision approaches and suggests that the official announcement of the successful acquisition will be issued in early February.

Architectural Web site Arch Daily points to a design competition at Open Source House for individuals or teams to create a eco-friendly sustainable single-family house for a specifically designated spot in Ghana. The contest, which runs until May 15, 2010, encourages designers to "think big" and come up with ways their initial designs can be implemented on a larger scale.

This is our first Digital Camera, but from what I have heard there are many Linux compatible digital cameras, somewhere at Microsoft somebody just cringed.

At first glance, Red Hat’s biggest rival is Microsoft. But take a closer look and Red Hat seems to be equally concerned about two other fierce rivals. They are (1) Free Linux and (2) so-called low-cost Linux support offerings from Novell and Oracle. Here’s the story.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article on free games for Linux and thought it was time to write a bit more on the subject. Actually, I had a lot of fun doing the research for this article and telling my sons that I really was "working." I don't really play that many games, so when I do, there are a few things that I look for.

The second day of the conference dawned just as bright and sunny as the first. The opening keynote was delivered by Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She spoke on the history of the FOSS movement as birthed by Richard Stallman and it's paradoxical growth during the same period that governments and corporate bodies were pushing their agenda for stronger IP and copyright control. Gabrielle took the audience through the wrangling that forever forced the FOSS community into the political arena and created the biggest threat to the traditional concept of IP that exists today.

If you are an geeky user who keeps installing various software and updates then with the passage of time you will feel that your system is messed up. Here is what you need to do.

When I first started using Ubuntu some 3 years ago, I found it really hard to get applications similar to the ones I used in Windows. After browsing for a long time, I made this amazing discovery. You don't have to look for "similar" apps, you can have even better apps here in Ubuntu/Linux.

As free and open source software becomes more and more a part of mainstream computing, it is common to find large commercial organisations taking a big interest in FOSS projects, sometimes to the extent of taking over such projects.