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If the owner can disable a phone with nothing but access to a computer or another mobile device, so can Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia or Apple. Google and Apple have already demonstrated their ability to remove software from all devices using their respective operating systems. If the designers of a phone’s operating system can brick a phone, guess who else can do the same? Everybody from the NSA to your friendly neighborhood police force, that’s who. At most, all they’ll need is a convincing argument that they’re acting in the interest of “public safety.”

You can shuffle, bend, shape and manipulate the statistics all you want. There is no way to gauge or even identify the one single moment when having a computer changes the course of a young life. For that to happen, however, there needs to have been an “aha!” moment. A moment when the light illuminates the child’s awareness. A moment when the kid realizes that (s)he is in control of what her computer does. The moment when she understands that all she needs to do is learn how to speak to her computer in a language it understands.

At first glance, it might look as if there’s very little for what blogger Gary Newell calls the Everyday Linux User, those who have adopted free software at home or in a mom and pop business. To my eyes, there is barely enough — but that still qualifies as enough.

That’s great for those tied to Windows, but doesn’t offer much help to those using Linux or OS X. As for the call for users to use good computer hygiene, most of us are doing that anyway — it’s not like this is the first security risk that’s arisen around the USB port.

Eventually, you come to realize that there’s more to life than Bash scripts and LAN parties with your Linux geek buddies. Well, maybe you do…or maybe not. If you do, you might decide to put yourself back on the dating market. Where do you start? I think we can all agree to rule out LUG meetings, Linux Foundation events and the laundromat. The ratio for men to women at these locations is bleak.

During that age of the dinosaur, Mandrake was considered to be the cat’s meow of easy-to-use Linux distributions. It installed easily, some said easier than Windows, and it’s partitioning tool made cutting up a disk easier than slicing a piece of mincemeat pie. Indeed, Linux oldtimers sometimes openly laughed at Mandrake, insinuating that ease-of-use somehow made Linux less Linux.

Every now and then, you get the opportunity to show others what your Linux computer looks like. Some of those people will want to give Linux a shot on their computers as well. I can’t think of anything as gratifying as teaching someone how to use desktop Linux. On a personal level, I do it because I am sick of fixing friends’ and family’s Windows problems. On a professional level, well…that’s my job.

It’s official. The All Things Open (ATO) conference that had it’s inaugural run in Raleigh last year wasn’t just a flash in the pan. As event chair Todd Lewis promised at the end of last year’s event, ATO is returning to the Raleigh Convention Center on October 22nd and 23rd. Again this year, FOSS Force is an official Media Partner of the conference.

Since at least the Maya 13 release we’ve had fits with the Nvidia driver and fonts in KDE. Sure the recommended driver installs fine, but upon the mandatory reboot, all is not well in Linuxland. While the actual desktop and the bottom panel display properly, anything that has anything to do with fonts is wonky. They are huge.

The only reason that Williamson County as a whole shows a high per capita income is because Round Rock is home to thousands of “dellionaires.” Round Rock is the international headquarters for Dell. Dellionaires are Dell employees who owned Dell stock before it took off and made them some money. A lot of money. At one time there were everyday employees at Dell worth a million dollars or more — thus the term “dellionaires.” Without them, Williamson county population would have a much lower income average.

Let’s face it, anyone still running XP who’s also still using Internet Explorer as a default browser isn’t the most computer knowledgeable person in the universe or even on the block. Forget the fact that Internet Explorer has never been a secure browser, XP users haven’t even been able to upgrade the browser since version 8, released five years ago.

Ikey Doherty is probably one of the most tech-smart people I know. Fact is, Ikey is much like that guy you hear about on the news, the guy that can hear a string of four digit numbers and tell you the sum of them in a couple of seconds. Now, I don’t know if Ikey is capable of that feat, but I do know what he can do.

I’ve spent a good share of my time asking myself what would have to change in order to make Linux on the desktop a viable choice for the mainstream user. I became curious enough to ask you a question: if you could wave your magic wand and change only one thing about Linux or even the Linuxsphere in general, what would it be? Let’s take a look at what some of you had to say.

This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O. L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra to easily access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had challenges in using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII standard and searching text was a huge problem. Pavithra Hanchagaiah started helping to collect information about about vachanas and document them into Unicode by writing scripts to customize open source software to convert the Kannada fonts from ASCII into Unicode.

The fact is, we’ll never see “the year of desktop Linux.” Not the way we imagine it anyway. Many of us long for the time when Linux will become a well known alternative to Microsoft Windows. That just isn’t gonna happen.

This, of course, created quite a stir among privacy advocates. So much so that the folks in Redmond on Thrusday announced a change of policy when it comes to riffling through people’s Hotmail accounts. They’re still going to do it, but in the future the company will publish stats regarding its breaking into people’s free Hotmail accounts. In other words, we’ll know just how much they do it.

It’s hard to remember that it wasn’t that long ago that we only had a couple of choices to meet our computing needs. As recently as 2007, the year before Obama was elected, someone looking for a new computer basically could choose between a desktop or a laptop. In mobile, Research In Motion offered the Blackberry, which candidate Obama was famous for using — and still uses.

The sharing feature of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress is currently being exploited for the purpose of sending spam and possibly for DDOS attacks. FOSS Force became aware of this after we began looking into emails being sent to us by our server’s security system, notifying us of massive amounts of email being sent from our server. An investigation by our IT people traced the problem to the “Sharing” function of the Jetpack plugin.

The thing to remember if you should find yourself at a workshop hosted by a person who’s “open source” company really wants to be Microsoft or Oracle is that the open source community, especially at the enterprise level, is a microcosm of the greater community from which it sprung. Don’t be disheartened by a presenter whose message is that “it’s all about the money” and that open source is nothing but another way of doing business. I promise you that two or three workshops down the road you’ll realize that person represents the minority — and that’ll make you feel very good.

Those of us who use Linux as our main operating system are insulated from this problem. A smaller number of us may be trying to help others ween themselves from Microsoft Windows entirely. The first thing some of us do is search for one of the more user friendly distros. A few of these distros claim to mimic one or more of the Microsoft operating systems. And yeah, there are some visual similarities, but that’s where it ends.