Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

Columbia University researchers claim millions of HP printers could be open to remote attack via unsecured Remote Firmware Updates. Cybercriminals could steal personal information or attack otherwise secure networks. HP agrees there is a theoretical security problem but says no customer has ever reported unauthorized printer access. The company denies some of the claims and is still investigating others.

Good news for owners of HTC's Android devices - HTC has expanded its official bootloader unlock utility to cover all HTC Android devices launched after September 2011, no matter the carrier. Older models will also be added to the tool, but this will take a little longer.

Adrian Chadd is the current FreeBSD net80211/ath driver maintainer and developer. He's been working with a few others to get usable 802.11n support into FreeBSD. We thought we'd have a quick chat and ask how things are going.

"Earlier today, Samsung revealed that it won't update the Galaxy S, its most successful smartphone to date, to the latest version of Android. You might shrug and dismiss that as just more evidence of Android's inherent fragmentation or the need for buyers to beware, but I take grave issue with it. This is a decision based not on technical constraints, as Samsung would have you believe, but on hubris." This. A gazillion million thousand times this. Also: "It's simple: make a large high-end device, a smaller value device, and a QWERTY device. Maybe one or two other specialty form factors, tops. That's it. Update them once a year, and keep the names the same." It would make updating a hell of a lot easier. We don't need the Samsung Galaxy SII Epic 4G Touch Sensation.

After much speculation over whether Mozilla, the non-profit foundation, and Google, the search and advertising company, would renew their default search provision deal, Mozilla has announced that a new multi-year deal has been made. The deal will see Google continue to be the default search provider in the Firefox browser for "at least three additional years".