Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

Cenatic, Spain's open source center, has published a model to help calculate cost savings that are possible by switching to free and open source software on desktop PCs. Switching a basic government desktop PC configuration to free and open source, for example, will save some 5000 euro per desktop per year, Cenatic's model shows.

Fresh obfuscated Tor bridges are needed more than ever, since they are the only way for people to access Tor in some areas of the world (like China, Iran and Syria). But it is not the same as an exit node.

What the argument over the names often boils down to is philosophy, not just attribution or credit. GNU was created with software freedom in mind. Linux, in its genesis, was proprietary until it adopted the GNU GPL licence and then became mainstream.

Hispalinux’s complaint called the implementation of UEFI Secure Boot an “obstruction mechanism” and “a de facto technological jail for computer booting systems.”

If you are in search of an alternative for Google Reader, this article offers a list to choose from. They have been listed under three categories – Desktop, Self-hosted, and Web service. Three are under each category, and are the ones I’ve either used in the past, or have read about.

There is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped.

The UK Government Service Design Manual says to "Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, Web servers, databases and programming languages." The policy is in place to move forward.