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This really is a horse race now, with ten great blogs at the starting gate to determine who gets the bragging rights to claim the FOSS Force Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog–2013 prize. Unfortunately, more than a few really great blogs that were in the running in the second round of our competition are, sadly, now gone. Oh well, that’s the way it goes. Sometimes really good horses fail to win, place or show.

The good news is, we found plenty of great new blogs and we’ve now reached the second round in our vote. We’ve ended up with ten additional blogs to consider, in addition to the nine that were already on our list. That means voters now have a field of 19 blogs from which to choose. As with the first qualifying round, you can vote for one or two blogs. Because this is an elimination round and not a qualifying round, however, there is no longer any way to add a new blog for consideration. As Flip Wilson’s Geraldine used to say, “What you see is what you get.”

We are especially keen on Froman’s feigned concern for the proposed ban’s “effect on U.S. consumers.” Evidently studies have been done that have proved that the American psyche would be irrevocably damaged if we couldn’t buy old, outdated versions of Apple products. Oh, did we forget to tell you that this ban is on Apple devices that are all at least a year old?

Although the TOR Project’s policies might have left the door open to allow this sort of security breach to happen, that in no way excuses those who took advantage of a situation to execute this exploit. Nor does the fact that the malware installed on TOR users’ computers did no harm other than calling home with an identification report make make this any less of a cybercrime.

If you're new to the world of tech freedom, TOR is supposed to be a safe zone, a sanctuary. Among other things, it offers a way to surf anonymously. Governments hate it because the bad guys can use it as a way to evade detection. Digital freedom fighters like it for the same reason.

We’ve grown used to seeing demonstrations of computer tech in these police proceedurals, but rarely anything that looks so obviously like a commercial. In all instances, the camera lingers on a shot of the GUI formerly known as Metro. In some cases we see Skype being used, with the brand conspicously evident. In others, we get treated to watching a handheld tablet turn into something resembling a laptop, perhaps a netbook, when the device is connected with it’s cover keyboard. Wow! Microsoft magic at work.

A review of the week's biggest stories in the world of FOSS.

Your answers also showed us just how diverse the readership here is. Not only did we see a lot of you offering up the usual suspects, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora, we also got reminders of Linux’s rich history. It was somewhat gratifying to discover that some who visit here first tried Linux using long gone but not forgotten distros such as Yggdrasil and Soft Landing System.

For too long, we’ve been sitting around wringing our hands, sometimes proclaiming this to finally be the year of the Linux desktop without doing anything to make it happen and sometimes bemoaning the fact that the world still hasn’t discovered Linux as the secret to computing happiness. The thing is, the world never knows anything about secrets until they’re not secret anymore. We’ve been wanting Linux to just “catch on,” while we’ve been blaming the OEMs for not automatically pushing our home grown geek-centric distros with the same elan they put behind their bread and butter Windows.

It’s beginning to look as if the naysayers are right about Mark Shuttleworth’s hopes to raise $32 million to produce about 40,000 Ubuntu Edge devices. It ain’t going to happen, unless he manages to pull another rabbit out of the hat. Right now, his Indiegogo campaign is stalled at a little over $7 million, where it’s been for several days.

The race has begun. You get to decide which FOSS and Linux blog gets the honor of being the first ever winner of the FOSS Force “Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog.” The nomination process starts now with our qualifying poll.

A roundup of the major stories this week in the world of FOSS.

At the Def Con hacker conference early next month, O’Connor, a security researcher who runs the consultancy Malice Afterthought, plans to unveil Creepy Distributed Object Locator or CreepyDOL, a system of Linux computers that cost less than $60 each and are designed to be hidden around an urban or suburban area. The little black boxes can wirelessly track the movements of cell phones or other mobile devices, feeding the information they collect into a database where an administrator can monitor targets on a map-based interface. A proof-of-concept version of the system that O’Connor has built includes ten of the spy nodes, each capable of reading the wireless signals of nearby devices and communicating back to a central server by piggybacking on any available Wifi network.

This is good for us on the penguin farm. It only strengthens our argument that Linux is more secure than the other brands. In Linux, there are no secret back doors. Your computer won’t secretly call it’s handlers at the NSA to file a report on you. If you’re really paranoid and don’t trust the binaries supplied by your distro, afraid they’ve slipped in something nefarious that’s not in the code you’ve seen, go ahead and compile from source. It’ll be a lot of work, but if it makes you sleep better at night, go for it.

The IAB wants you to know that if you don’t let online advertisers follow you around when you’re surfing, then you’re scum, a criminal and probably a traitor to your country. At least, that would seem to be the thick of it from reading their latest in a series of diatribes against Mozilla published last Tuesday on their website under the heading “Has Mozilla Lost Its Values?”.

We learned last week from Phoronix that the first smartphone from Jolla will be utilizing Wayland instead of X. As we already reported, this phone will feature a 4.5-inch display, 16GB of storage, and an 8MP camera. The device is also supposed to be capable of running all Android apps with no modifications. It will sell for $500 US and is expected to be available online through their website before year’s end.

The results have been tallied and Debian got the most votes in our Community Distro Poll. We would call them the “winner,” but this wasn’t about winners and losers. It was about trying to reach a consensus on what we mean by the term “community distro.”

I’m beginning to rethink Yahoo, just as I reappraised my feelings on the old Novel after they went to bat against SCO for the benefit of IBM and Linux. On Monday, the Sunnyvale, California company pulled a honest-to-goodness rabbit out of the hat when they managed to persuade a FISA court to order the Obama administration to declassify as much as possible of a 2008 court decision justifying Prism before releasing it to the public.

No matter what the reason, it’s done. In the process, a gaping hole has been discovered in the computer security of all governments and businesses that compete in any way with the United States. The name of that hole is “proprietary binaries.”

Now that we got last week out of the way, let’s look at what happened this week–or at least news that came to our attention this week…We heard early in the week that Microsoft was getting ready to make some big changes in their management structure on Thursday. Although we’re of the opinion that a company that’s been as mismanaged as Microsoft seems to have been for at least the last five years should be thinking of pulling a CEO switch, that seems to be far from the case.