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There’s plenty about Rockstar vs Everybody Android to remind me of the SCO fiasco. Enough so to make me wish we still had PJ and Groklaw to take care of the play-by-play. Last week, Google returned fire. Wouldn’t it be nice to have PJ’s take on this?

First the good news. According to security company Websense, the amount of phishing attempts we’re finding in our email dropped remarkably this year, from 1.12% of all email volume down to 0.5%. Now, the bad news. The folks doing the phishing are getting better at targeting their attempts, so they don’t need to send as many emails to hook their prey.

What were the ten best stories we published on FOSS Force this year? Well, that would depend on a lot of things, wouldn't it, such as who's asking? We could tell you what we think our ten best stories were this year, but we'll hold that until next week. Today we're going to look at the ten stories that got the most reads on our site this year.

Since 2005, with the exception of last year, I have “worked” every Christmas day. I accentuate “worked” because I am lucky enough to have a job that feels more like a hobby than it does labor. I give computers to kids who cannot afford them. What’s not to like? I plan to work some of Christmas morning this year too.

In October, 2000, when Microsoft was presumably working on what would become XP, they were hacked. Somebody broke into their systems and managed to at least look at source code for Windows and Office. The folks in Redmond dutifully called in the FBI, examined their code and found it hadn’t been compromised. Or so they said.

Target has announced that over 40 million customer credit card transactions have been hijacked since Black Friday. The data was stolen from transactions at the retailer’s brick and mortar stores. Online transactions are evidently not affected. All information contained in a credit card’s magnetic stripe has been compromised, enough information to make counterfeit cards.

Last week, we talked about just how important even your smallest contribution to FOSS might be. It doesn’t matter whether you occasionally spend time in forums helping others or if you submit code for review into the kernel. Everything you do goes into the sand pail. Eventually, everything you do filters down to the place it’s needed most: the everyday computer user.

Just three months ago, back in September, WordPress issued version 3.6.1 of their content management and blogging platform. Last week they issued 3.8. In between there was 3.7 and 3.7.1, the later release raising eyebrows when it included an automatic “minor point” upgrade feature that can’t be easily disabled.

This would seem to be a very important cautionary tale for anyone considering hiring Oracle for a major project. They’ve already taken at least $43 million from Oregon, with some sources putting the figure at closer to $90 million, yet they don’t bother to send their best people to design and build the project. Is that any way to treat a $40 million dollar client, even a government one?

If you think that Nokia is only concentrating on Windows handsets, think again. For a while now, the folks from Finland have been working on re-positioning Android to be used on their entry level line of phones called Asha. The project, with the code names Normandy and AoL (Asha on Linux), seeks to bring new life to the line by replacing the current operating system, Series 40, which is getting a little long of tooth.

For the record, when we first started out we did contact Microsoft and told them what we wanted to accomplish. On our third attempt to contact them, we did receive a response. They offered us Windows XP SP1 at 50 dollars a license.

Since Edward Snowden ruined it for everyone by making us aware of the fact that we share the water with sharks when we surf, security has been a key word. This, of course, has been a bonanza for security vendors and right now everyone is clamoring to get on the gravy train.

Back on Halloween, when we ran our article on Ross Gardler’s presentation on “Microsoft and Open Source” at the All Things Open conference, we posted a poll that asked, “Is Microsoft committed to open source?” Guess what? You answered “no,” as in “nope,” “nadda” or “ain’t no way, baby.”

If the digital world is undergoing a binary version of the global warming awareness thingie, you can treat the gamers as a solar flare heading straight for our atmosphere. They don’t care about how long your smartphone battery is going to last, because they need a nuclear plant’s worth of power to play their games. They need the best games, and accordingly, the best hardware. Which means, if you want to be the gamers’ darling you need to design hardware that can do that and then provide drivers that bring all that power to bear. Like cars and their transmissions.

On Sunday, Forbes reported that FindTheBest, an online comparison shopping site, had managed to have a patent being used against it invalidated in federal court. In this case, Denese Cote, a federal judge in N.Y. state found in favor of FindTheBest and invalidated the patent.

We may hear more about this case later. After the plaintiff, Lumen View Technology LLC, demanded $50,000 from FindTheBest for infringing their patent, the site filed suit against the patent troll under the RICO act.

As news continues to be released, it becomes more and more obvious that the NSA is now the de facto owner of the Internet and at this point it appears that little can be done about it. The federal government has poured over $1.5 billion into the Bumblehive project alone, the million square foot facility in Utah that includes a 100,000 square foot data center. It seems doubtful, given the amount of money the U.S. government has put into such NSA projects, that legislators will vote to shut down these operations anytime soon — if ever.

Reuters reported on Monday that the search company has agreed to pony-up $17 million in order to settle a claim by 37 states and the District of Colombia that it had secretly tracked users of smartphones by purposefully circumventing web browser protections. This was after the firm had already reached a $22 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in August of last year in a case related to the same activity.

We’re always bemoaning the injustices in the world, but when given the opportunity to help one child, one time, no one seizes the opportunity because “I don’t know any poor people?” Take my word for it — poor people won’t be that hard to find.

This wasn’t the case with a group of Reddit users last week, where a scene broke out in a comment thread that pretty much turned into a mob that reminded me of the Cooks Source massacre of 2010. It seems that a few folks don’t need to know the full story before picking up their virtual weapons and launching an attack. They’re ready to bring SourceForge to its knees by flooding all of SourceForge’s download mirror sites with emails vilifying the service.

On October 26th, ten year old Charlie Thompson went to a Halloween party at a friends house in rural New York state. The weather was reasonably mild, so much of the party took place outside. At some point the children began playing a game of hide and seek. Charlie and another boy found a wooden board that Charlie thought would be a perfect place to hide. He lifted the board and knelt on another board that was underneath.