Victoria’s Electoral Commission has flagged plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux software in the next state election in November this year.

Red Hat? SUSE Linux? Apache? MySQL? These are bad, evil, un-American entities. Apparently. They and the rest of those dirty rotten open-source software scoundrels are responsible for a "tidal wave of losses in U.S. jobs and competitiveness."

SourceForge has now changed their policy regarding their ban on users from "sanctioned countries."

The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into Google's business activities after complaints from three European companies. The companies, which offer services similar to Google's, believe that Google actively demotes their rankings in its search results because they are competitors.

Horizons Regional Council "would be remiss not to investigate alternatives" to Microsoft on the desktop, as it has a responsibility to the ratepayers that fund it to spend their money wisely, says William Gordon, IT team leader at the council.

"The OpenNet Initiative is proud to release its 2009 Year in Review, a look into instances of filtering, surveillance, and information warfare around the world in 2009 [...] The OpenNet Initiative estimates that at the end of 2009, 32% of all Internet users were accessing a filtered version of the Internet."

Only three days after posting my blog regarding the plight of Google's Chinese customers and how their data is now at the whims of a US-based company and its conflict with the Chinese government, I read about the issues of SourceForge.net and the U.S. State Department's Export lists and how the data stored in a US-based company, sometimes created by non-U.S.

Horizons Regional Council will take open-source software for a spin on its desktop computers early this year under a push to bring free software to public sector PCs.