Rage-inducing and despicable. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, three major textbook publishers, Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education, are suing a small startup company that produces open and free alternative textbooks. This startup, Boundless Learning, builds textbooks using creative commons licensed and otherwise freely available material - and this poses a threat to the three large textbook publishers. So, what do you do when you feel threatened? Well, file a copyright infringement lawsuit, of course.

"Ferdinand A. Porsche, who designed the original Porsche 911, the snazzy, powerful sports car that became the lasting signature of the German automobile company founded by his grandfather and later run by his father, died on Thursday in Salzburg, Austria. He was 76." I believe only Italians can design beautiful cars (I mean, game over, kids), but there's no denying that the 911 is a true icon. Cars technically don't have a place on OSNews, but Ferdinand Porsche's passing cannot go by unmentioned.

Google has just responded to the first set of questions from the EU regarding its new consolidated privacy policy. The EU inquiry is being headed by the French - more specifically, by France's National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties. So, the country that monitors all its citizens' internet traffic for possible copyright infringement is spearheading the investigation into Google's new privacy policy? I'm not sure I should be laughing, crying, or shoving shards of smallpox-infested glass underneath my fingernails.

Google's CEO, Larry Page, has just published a letter titled "2012 Update from the CEO". It's a state of the union-sort of thing, mostly filled with the usual stuff of how great Google supposedly is (we'll decide that for ourselves, why thank you). There's one bit in it, though, that caught my eye - something that puts Android's supposed fragmentation issues in a rather different light.

It had to be said. It had to be said because no one else in the technology industry had the guts to say it. "I think it's time to stop giving Windows Phone a pass." Thanks, Joshua Topolsky. He's right. A few weeks ago I went back to my HTC HD7 for a few days while I was getting acquainted with the Android ROM scene, and to my utter surprise, most of my problems with Windows Phone 7 from when the platform was just released were still there.

Interesting, if not inherently flawed, article by Farhad Manjoo. "Honan might be right that Google has violated its own definition of evil, but doesn't it matter that every one of its rivals also routinely violates Google's definition of evil?" I say flawed, because I value promises more than anything. Google has done things recently that break their initial promise. That sucks - there's no way around it. I do love Gruber's take, though: "It's not that Google is evil. It's that they're hypocrites. That's the difference between Google and its competitors." In other words, it's perfectly fine to be an evil scumbag company, as long as you're not claiming you're not. That's a rather... Warped view on morality.

Notch, creator of the immensely popular and successful Minecraft, has announced his next game project. It's a multiplayer and single player space simulator with all the usual stuff like resource mining, combat, exploration, and so on. However, a very unique aspect is that each player's ship has a custom fully programmable 16bit CPU which uses a custom, hand-made instruction set. The possibilities are amazing.

It happened when I first used a PalmOS device. It happened when I first used the BeOS. It happened when I first used an iPhone. And now it's happened by just watching a video - that sense that there's no need to wait for the future, because it's already here. Google has just unveiled its augmented reality glasses, Project Glass, and it will blow you away.

"The ARM architecture is growing in popularity and is expected to expand its reach beyond the mobile and 'small embedded' device space that it currently occupies. Over the next few years, we are likely to see ARM servers and, potentially, desktops. Fedora has had at least some ARM support for the last few years, but always as a secondary architecture, which meant that the support lagged that of the two primary architectures (32 and 64-bit x86) of the distribution. Recently, though, there has been discussion of 'elevating' ARM to a primary architecture, but, so far, there is lots of resistance to a move like that."

You have just bought tickets to an exotic vacation spot. You board the flight, you land safely, you pull your netbook from your backpack, fire it up, and then check if there are any available Wireless networks. Indeed there are, unencrypted, passwordless, waiting for you. So you connect to the most convenient hotspot and start surfing. Being addicted as you are, you want to login into your email or social network just to check if something cardinal happened in the world during your four-hour flight. You're about to hit the sign in button. Stop. What you're about to do might not be safe.

HD Guru writes that new HDTVs now have all the hardware (webcams, audio mics, Internet connectivity) and software (facial and speech recognition, etc) to make them ideal for data collection on those watching. Samsung, the article's focus, does not disclose what OS its new HDTVs use, making it hard to judge whether they are secure from hacking. A follow-up article prints Samsung's privacy statement along with evaluation by Gary Merson of HD Guru.

"GNOME 3.4 introduces a range of new features. A new document search facility allows quick access to content stored both on your device and online. Smooth scrolling means that moving through content is slick and graceful. New application menus, which are located on the top bar, provide a useful way to access application options and actions." And a lot more.

Two years ago, Linux guru Caitlyn Martin argued that "Ubuntu is a Poor Standard Bearer for Linux" due to reliability issues. She said that "Other distributions have problematic releases but other major distributions do not have significant problems in nearly every release. Ubuntu does." In her follow-up piece "How Canonical Can Do Ubuntu Right: It Isn't a Technical Problem," she explained how "...the problem I am describing is probably rooted in policy or business decisions that have been made..." and she offered specific ideas on how Canoncial could address the situation. Are these criticisms valid today? Does Ubuntu offer good reliability? Does it deserve its mindshare as the representative of PC Linux?

The WSJ/The Verge headline drew me away from Skyrim: Google to sell tablets? What, are they going to build their own? That's huge! "The Internet search company is planning to market and sell tablets directly to consumers through an online store, similar to rivals Apple and Amazon, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is an effort to turn around sluggish sales of tablet computers powered by Google's Android software. Some of the online store's future tablets are expected to be co-branded with Google's name, said people familiar with the matter. Google won't make the devices and its existing partners such as Samsung and ASUS will be responsible for the hardware." Wait, I emerged from Skyrim for an online store? Lame.