With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'

According to MSNBC, up to 50 million Megaupload users could lose their data by Thursday. They haven't been able to access their data since surprise US government raids early this month. None of these users has been charged with any crime. This continues the US trend towards expanded use of forfeiture laws to arbitrarily seize and/or destroy private property without due process. The US Constitution's 5th Amendment states "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty or property without due process or law; nor shall private property be taken... without just compensation." The situation raises questions both about the reliability of cloud services for data storage and the end of due process in the United States.

Les Bell has released (Jan 2012) his course material "Introduction to OS/2 Warp Programming" under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. The course had been released with its original files, OOXML, ODF, PDF version and lab exercises.

Jon Rubinstein, once a prominent voice in the mobile community as he sought to reinvent Palm, has left HP. The move isn't a surprise considering how many management shuffles HP has gone through as of late, and Rubinstein has all but disappeared from the webOS landscape in its recent transition to an open source platform.

This is what we call an epic blunder of epic proportions. The article that used to be here, was submitted to us in full, with Tom Krazit as the submitter. As it turns out, though, this article is already published at PaidContent.org, so it's pretty clear someone kindly submitted it to us, but included the whole of that article. For some reason, I let it slip through without checking if it was actually an original - which I normally always do. Nobody contacted us so far, but I'm still incredibly sorry about this. Be sure to click this link and send traffic to PaidContent.org.

I promise we'll have more on ACTA next week, but for now, I'm too busy to properly cover the subject. In any case, the European Commission signed it today, but that means little - each individual member state's parliament still has to ratify it, and if one votes against it, it's over. The European Parliament has to accept it too - not a done deal either. My opinion on the matter is clear.

"It's no longer possible to write a single app that takes advantage of the full range of Mac OS X features. Some APIs only work inside the Mac App Store. Others only work outside it. Presumably, this gap will widen as more new features are App Store-exclusive, while sandboxing places greater restrictions on what App Store apps are allowed to do." Anybody surprised by this, here's the clue stick. Please proceed to hit yourself with it.

"Android accounted for 39% of the market in the final three months of last year, up from 29% a year earlier, Strategy Analytics said. Apple's share fell to 58% from 68%. Microsoft's share stood at 1.5%." Really now.

"HP today began executing its plan to deliver an open webOS by committing to a schedule for making the platform's source code available under an open source license. The company aims to complete this milestone in its entirety by September. HP also announced it is releasing version 2.0 of webOS's innovative developer tool, Enyo. Enyo 2.0 enables developers to write a single application that works across mobile devices and desktop web browsers, from the webOS, iOS and Android platforms to the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers - and more. The source code for Enyo is available today, giving the open source community immediate access to the acclaimed application framework for webOS."

Google has updated its privacy policy - in fact, it has consolidated a mess of over 70 different privacy policies each covering an individual service into one, simpler policy. You'll now be treated as a single account, and data will be shared between Google services to make search results and ads more personalised (I assumed they already did that - makes sense).

InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy, security, social networking, and other interesting twists to Google's Chrome browser. 'When is it worth ditching Chrome for a Chromium-based remix? Some of the spinoffs are little better than novelties. Some have good ideas implemented in an iffy way. But a few point toward some genuinely new directions for both Chrome and other browsers.'

Why do people troll? Can we prevent trolling or limit the damage trolls do? Here are some thoughts on trollology derived from academic studies and web research.

Apple reported its quarterly results, and thanks to the iPhone 4S and the iPad, Apple is putting out bizarre figures - 37 million iPhones, 15.5 million iPads. "The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter." Is this the end of Android's dominance, or just a single uberquarter due to the new iPhone?

Summer last year, the Dutch courts ruled that Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 did not infringe on Apple's community designs, and as such, would not be banned from The Netherlands. This was a "quick case", and as such, Apple had the right to appeal and turn this into a "full case". Apple did, but I now think they really wish they hadn't - the Court of Appeal in The Hague has pretty much ripped Apple a new one , and upheld the District Court's ruling.