The federal government has censored approximately 90 per cent of a secret document outlining its controversial plans to snoop on Australians' web surfing, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws, out of fear the document could cause "premature unnecessary debate".

You might have missed the news just before the holidays that Microsoft has become slightly more open with respect to its networking protocols. Late last year, they announced a way for third parties to license their core file sharing protocols through an independent organization called the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation.

Thanks to the EU, and contrary to much media speculation from both sides of the water, we can now hope for a positive expansion of innovation and competition on the desktop. All the evidence suggests that control of all aspects of the market by one company is neither healthy nor conducive to innovation or competition.

We need to build communities and software around open protocols. We need to make it so that social networking is a protocol, much like e-mail is a protocol. [...] We need to create critical mass around open standards and protocols.

Pidgin is a popular open source client for yahoo messenger and other IM protocols. Yahoo recently updated their client and older versions of pidgin will be unable to login to yahoo. Learn how to do a work around.

Subversion (svn) is an open-source version control system (VCS), used in the development of many software projects. This tutorial shows how to install Subversion on Ubuntu 11.10 and how to configure it to allow access to a repository through different protocols: file://, http://, https://, svn://, and svn+ssh://.

Linux distributor Xandros is licensing messaging protocols from Microsoft as part of an expansion of the partnership the two companies forged in June.

I think this should work for any Linux operating system using Gnome, I have tested on Debian and Ubuntu.

Well, automatic login will let you avoid to enter your login and password each time you turn on your PC, this could be insecure, but if your computer is physically secured it is Ok to enable this, that could make your booting more smooth.

How to do it?

Subversion (svn) is an open-source version control system (VCS), used in the development of many software projects. This tutorial shows how to install Subversion on Debian Squeeze and how to configure it to allow access to a repository through different protocols: file://, http://, https://, svn://, and svn+ssh://.