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"Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there."

This year at Opensource.com, we challenged our contributors to give us the best and most useful guides, how-tos, and tutorials they could produce from their experiences and work in various open source industries and sectors. Our best guides and tutorials this year fell within the four buckets you see below. If you can answer YES to any of the following questions, there's an open source way guide here for you! Do you...

I've been following the progress of OpenShot, an open source video editor, for the past few years. I think it achieves just the right balance between ease-of-use and a rich feature set. When I heard about the OpenShot Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, I was one of the first to contribute. By the deadline, their intended fund raising goal was more than doubled at $45,000+. This success also meant that OpenShot 2.0 will become available on Windows and Macintosh. 

Security firm Kaspersky Lab has been monitoring cyber attacks on gaming systems and the firm says that the release of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One coincides with sharp rise in hacking attacks in late November. Kaspersky says they estimate an average of 34,000 cyber attacks per day on a global scale. The firm now knows of 4.6 million malware pieces that are targeting these new gaming systems.

The role of community managers continues to evolve. I started to realize this after attending my first Community Leadership Summit earlier this year. My biggest take-away from it? Community management is an investment and its value is increasing. Heads up to employers: buy, buy, buy, and then invest some more.

Advancing prudently but quietly within the Debian camp is the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD operating system that pairs Debian's GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel. For Debian 8.0 "Jessie" there are continued improvements on this spin that does away with the Linux kernel. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Jessie/Sid currently defaults to the FreeBSD 9.2.0 kernel, but a FreeBSD 10.0 development kernel has already landed in Debian and is the focus of today's benchmarks.

Bringing together people with high-energy and motivation to create startups that have the potential to make a positive impact on society is a great endeavour. It takes vision to bring together inspiring leaders on one platform and create an environment where their best skills are put to use for a larger cause. C3 Inspire is one of those organizations and thrives on such a vision. I spoke with Alim Maherali, founder of C3 Inspire, and that talk put a lot of things in perspective when it comes to building and successfully running an organization based on the open source principles of collaboration, connections, and sharing. In this interview, he tells me about the new culture of startups where there's a reigning sense of collaboration and the overwhelming use of open source software. my interview with Alim Maherali.

Embedded developers working on kernels or bare-metal programs often go through several development cycles. Each time the developer modifies the code, the code has to be compiled, the ELF (Executable and Linkable Format)/kernel image has to be copied onto the SD card, and the card then has to be transferred from the PC to the development board and rebooted.

For those NVIDIA gaming customers running Microsoft Windows 8.1 that have been thinking about giving Valve's SteamOS Linux-based gaming platform a try, here are some early benchmarks of the SteamOS 1.0 beta that compare the performance to Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro x64 on multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Opensource.com is here to tell the stories of those who use open source—software, hardware, and ways—to work, to create, to discover, and to add knowledge back to the world. And, interviews with these open source gurus are an excellent method of delivering that kind of thought-provoking content to our readers.

When Valve announced the public release of the beta for SteamOS 1.0 "Alchemist" on Friday they listed NVIDIA graphics as a hardware requirement, but I showed that AMD Radeon graphics with Catalyst would work and it's possible to get Intel graphics working (or the open-source graphics drivers in general) through a minor change to the Linux-based SteamOS kernel parameters. After that I ran some benchmarks and here are a few performance results comparing SteamOS 1.0 Beta to Ubuntu 13.10 with Intel HD Graphics.

The first workshop on "Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experience," was held at the Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO on November 17, 2013. This meeting was organized by the Software Sustainability Institute at the University of Edinburgh and the National Science Foundation to examine how we can create sustainable software platforms that can best serve the needs of scientific research.

Linux and OpenOffice now humming away on 15,000 Bavarian desktops The German city of Munich has declared that its famous move to open source software is over and a success.…

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is getting coal for Christmas. That's according to this 2-minute video just released by the ACLU portraying Santa as an NSA snoop. "They're watching almost every electronic device. The NSA is coming to town." Ho. Ho. Ho. Happy Holidays!

Coincidentally, Debian GNU/Linux 7.3 was released this weekend -- the same weekend as it being known that SteamOS is Debian-based...

Lantronix announced an IPv6 certified version of its tiny, RJ45-sized embedded Linux networking server called the XPort Pro Lx6 aimed at IoT applications. Lantronix’s Xport Pro has long been a favorite of embedded engineers looking for a low-cost networking server that doesn’t consume much space or power. The new XPort Pro Lx6 is almost physically […]

A comprehensive performance comparison is underway at Phoronix that pits SteamOS against other desktop Linux distributions, but for those anxious to see some performance numbers, here are benchmarks done so far this weekend from seven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the public SteamOS 1.0 Beta operating system. In this article are early benchmarks from seven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards running Valve's Debian Linux based SteamOS on an Intel Haswell system.

Google recently released and took back one of the biggest privacy features for Android since its launch. And we’re a little bummed. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote about a new and extremely important privacy tool in Android. Today, it realized the tool had actually been removed in an update to the mobile operating system earlier this week. After chatting with Google, the privacy advocacy group isn’t satisfied with why it was pulled.

Red Hat this week released the first beta to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. RHEL 7 is based upon improvements and other work that happened over the past few release cycles in Fedora and is riding on its new enterprise Linux 3.10 kernel. In this article is a first look at RHEL 7 Beta 1 along with our first benchmarks of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 comparing the results to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5.

Open source news for your reading pleasure. December 9-13, 2013 We scoured the web for some of this week's most interesting open source-related news stories so you don't have to. Here's what we found: