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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.

Mr. Ballmer probably also doesn’t want us reminding you this doesn’t mean that sales of Windows 8 have now outpaced sales of Vista. Although we don’t know for sure, we can only assume that Vista still has more total sales. Remember, Vista was so unpopular that many people bought boxes with Vista, only to take advantage of the rollback feature that allowed users to go back to the future and magically turn Vista into XP. Also, many Vista users immediately upgraded to Windows 7 as soon as it was released, when reviewers pronounced it didn’t suck as bad as Vista.

The poll asked the question, “If your hosting company offered a choice of the following operating systems, which would you choose?” Those taking the poll could choose from CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Scientific Linux, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

I’ll admit, the last time I got up close and personal with a Dell advertising flyer was years ago. Again, they usually go straight to the rotary file. But I distinctly remember noticing, quite a few years back on a day when I had nothing better to do than study junk mail, that “Dell recommends Windows XP” was plastered all over the thing. Right now I’ll willing to bet that a year ago it was “Dell recommends Windows 7.”

When was the last time masses of consumer computer users decided to migrate to a new operating system by installing one on a machine they already owned? I think “never” would be a pretty close to exact answer. Consumer computer users don’t install new operating systems, even on machines that’ve become obsolete by Microsoft standards but which could have new life with a Linux install.

Here at FOSS Force, we haven’t changed our online habits one ort since the NSA news broke. Part of that is fatalistic. What’s the use? If the faceless “they” wants to know where we’re going online or what search terms we use to get there, they’ll find out. We might as well just hand it to them and save them the trouble of planting some sort of trojan on our computers–which would be a lot of work to only discover we’re just a bunch of old hippies who still hate the government but who are too tired to do anything about it but complain.

In Part One we learned that installing Debian 7 definitely isn’t rocket science–anybody can do it! Now that we have our Debian system installed and our computer is booting into the world of Debian Linux, let’s take a look and discover our new computing environment. The default desktop environment in Debian 7 is GNOME version 3.4. Although it’s a pretty simple to learn interface, it might be a little confusing at first for new users used to working only in Windows. Let’s take a look at the major aspects of the GNOME screen, to help you learn your way around.

First of all you need a installation image (ISO file) which you can download from http://www.debian.org. I recommend the small network install image. After downloading the file, copy it to a blank CD, DVD or USB memory-stick. For information on creating a bootable USB memory stick, see the article "Create a Bootable Live USB Thumb Drive or Rescue Drive Using UNetbootin."

To some the GPL is merely a really cool model for developing software. It’s a way for many people, or many organizations, with a shared need or interest to develop software by spreading-out the cost through shared ownership of a product. Although that could also be accomplished with proprietary software, the open source license allows the use of different parts of the code in different applications, which might not be easily done under the proprietary model.

Texas? Did you really say Texas? The state that leads the world in the number of executions–that Texas? Well, la-di-da, who would’ve ever thought the folks down there in the Lone Star State would be the first to stand up and protect our inboxes? Does this mean that the spirits of Ann Richards and Maury Maverick, Jr. are looking over the Texas legislators?

Novell, which we expected to be near the top of the list, came in as a relatively trusted company by our readers. With an eighth place showing, only IBM scored fewer votes. We have little doubt that five years or so ago, Novell would’ve probably been right behind Microsoft as one of the least trusted companies in the FOSS world, due primarily to their dealings with Microsoft in support of their SUSE Linux distro, which many people thought was both underhanded and designed to spread FUD.

Back in olden times when I was growing up, in the days before cell phones, when a vacuum tubed Univac computer with enough RAM to hold a thousand words filled an industrial sized room, when telephones were absolutely always land lines and were nearly always connected to the Bell System, you had two major choices when you ordered phone service. You could either get a private line, which is what everybody pretty much has today, or a party line, which means you shared your phone service with who knows how many of your neighbors.

I suspect the issue will be returning to the table, now that they realize what they really needed to see wasn’t source code but security vulnerabilities and Microsoft’s policy for dealing with them. Many government clients are obviously going to see this as a betrayal of trust. Here they’ve been trusting Microsoft with their most sensitive data only to discover that their trusted friend Steve Ballmer has been handing over the keys to their computers to the U.S. spook community.