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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to review evidence that the NSA’s “Associational Tracking Program” is both unconstitutional and that it’s not authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act which the government has been using as justification of NSA practices. The EFF also provided the court with testimony from 22 separate organizations that detail how the NSA’s program of collecting telephone records is hampering their operations.

The lawsuit filed by patent troll Rockstar Consortium Inc. on Halloween against Google and at least five makers of Android handsets is about much more than merely the tons of money that would be reaped if the Rockstar cartel prevails. Mainly, it’s about gaining a competitive edge that could result in increased market share down the road.

We can’t figure out if Canonical wants to be Apple or Microsoft. Of one thing we’re certain, however, they clearly don’t want to be Linux.

It seems that Micah Lee, a technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has a website called “Fix Ubuntu,” on which he explains how keep Ubuntu from contacting Amazon and others everytime you use the OS’s search tool. Evidently, the folks at Canonical don’t like this and have instructed him that he must quit using their logo on his site. In addition, he must change the URL, https://fixubuntu.com/, to something that doesn’t contain the word Ubuntu.

After we made up our mind on our preference, we asked you what you thought with yet another of our unscientific polls, which we posted on October 10th. “Would you like your smartphone, tablet and PC interface to be the same?” we asked. We offered four choices: “Yes, exactly the same;” “Similar but not exact;” “No” and “Don’t know.”

You have no direct ability to correct change. You can request changes from your vendor. They might integrate it into a new future release. They might release a one off patch just for you. Well, guess what, you’re now your own special and unique snowflake in their world and that locks you in even further.

The legal papers were filed by Rockstar Consortium, a patent troll owned by Microsoft, Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, and Sony. They hold 6,000 plus patents purchased in an auction for $4.5 billion from bankrupt Canadian telecom Nortel. Google had been bidding against Rockstar for the same patents, but dropped out after placing a $4.4 billion bid that didn’t hold up. Not long afterwards, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in large part for its vast patent portfolio–just in case a patent war broke out.

One of the most popular Linux sites, Tuxmachines.org, announced on October 28th that it has been tentatively sold for $1,000. The Clarksville, Tennessee based site, owned and operated by Susan Linton, made the announcement in a short post on the site.

WordPress isn’t just for bloggers anymore. Although WordPress built it’s reputation as a blogging platform, it’s now much more than that. Some of the biggest sites on the web, where a temporarily broken site might have serious financial consequences, are running atop WordPress.

On October 2nd, we ran a poll and asked our readers, mostly free software devotees, to pick from a list of seven statements the one that best described where Microsoft would be five years from now.

Microsoft is embracing open source because they have no choice if they wish to keep their proprietary products relevant–especially in the cloud. If Windows Azure offered virtual machines running only on Windows, or only proprietary programs and apps for their stack, the service would fail miserably. Azure’s success depends on its ability to offer CentOS, Apache, Hadoop, Drupal and the like.

Ubuntu belongs to Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical. The last time we checked the GPL, they’re allowed to do with the code anything they want so long as they give any changes back to the community, which they appear to be doing.

So what happened in four short days? The news of SolusOS and Numix collaboration was a pretty big deal. It combined two potential FOSS powerhouses under one roof. It was certainly an exciting partnership.

What can you do when you can’t use Linux at work? You can still promote free open source! The best way to promote FOSS is to use it and to tell people who wonder what you use about free open source alternatives to commercial software.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to remember that only a few short years ago, GNOME won nearly every popularity poll and it seemed as if KDE was in danger of becoming the best desktop without users. Now, hardly a days goes by when we don’t hear of yet another project abandoning the GNOME desktop environment.

Ikey came to make news with his SolusOS 1.X releases. Even as a young distro, SolusOS broke the 20th place at Distrowatch and ultimately climbed to the 14th position. Based on Debian, he wanted to change some things that were happening in other Debian-based distros. But even the most stable of foundations are made less stable by other things.

You can be certain of one thing; if you’re a penguinista I’ll have your back at the All Things Open conference. I’ll be paying attention. Plenty of good companies and organizations will be represented at the the conference, to be held next week in Raleigh, but it is an enterprise conference so there will be a few snakes slithering about.

Back before the iPhone came along, when netbooks running GNU/Linux were threatening Redmond’s monopoly, it was said the company was allowing OEMs to install XP on the economy devices for as little as seven dollars, which was practically giving the OS away in those days. That may soon seem like a king’s ransom. If the likes of Bloomberg are to be believed, now Microsoft might be offering Windows Phone to HTC for gratis.

We see the usefulness of phone, tablet and desktop sharing a common interface. This would not only make it less of a brain strain on the user when moving from one device to the other, it would also come in handy for syncing devices, etc. The trouble is, the dynamics of a small phone screen compared to a large PC or laptop screen makes an exact copy unrealistic, something Steve Ballmer would’ve realized by now if he listened to his users.

“We love Raleigh, Durham and the RTP and hope to have a presence here very soon. We’ve been looking to do something here for a while. It’s a national center for IT and open source and it’s growing rapidly. In short, we’re long on the area. Having Red Hat and other prominent companies and educational institutions located here certainly helps of course.”

A number of reasons are often cited for disliking Ubuntu. Top of the list seems to be Unity. I maintain that Unity is a really good desktop environment. I spent some time working with it and I find it incredibly intuitive but my view of Unity is in the minority. I think that people coming to Linux for the first time and choosing Ubuntu as their distribution of choice will probably not be as put off by the experience as users that were brought up on Gnome 2.