For the purpose of this experiment, we’re going to just click through all regular installation screens with the default options using a fresh virtual machine. And we’re going to install ten applications from the most popular downloads list. And we’re going to assume the persona of a regular non-geek user.

Each time we ran through this experiment over the last few months, different software would end up being bundled in a rotation, but every single software that bundles itself ends up bundling the same culprits: browser hijackers that redirect your search engine, home page, and put extra ads everywhere.

Silent Circle's Blackphone already has customers in the military and its promise of encrypted communications has seen it put into service by other governments around the world.

The company says that legislation making encryption unavailable to the public could also hurt intelligence collection. The intelligence community today is a great deal larger and more diverse than it was 50 years ago.

Silent Circle wants to make this for the masses, but if the legislative landscape shifts now that midterm elections are over, it could mean that the government will only allow encrypted communications if it can pick and choose who gets to enjoy this "privilege."

The Firefox browser, lagging its well-heeled rivals, will soon be serving up an array of ads to one and all.

"We are only collecting minimal viable data" related to sponsored tiles, Herman said. Mozilla will collect a user's location but no more specific than the country the user is from, how many impressions the tile received, and how many times users pinned the tile to their New Tab page or removed it.

Just as per the schedule, OpenBSD 5.6 was released today, November 1, 2014.

If you already have an OpenBSD 5.5 system, and do not want to reinstall, upgrade instructions and advice can be found in the Upgrade Guide.

The vulnerability is currently being exploited via PowerPoint files. These specially crafted files contain a malicious OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) object.

Microsoft is still investigating the matter and deciding whether they will issue an out-of-band patch or wait for the next Patch Tuesday to plug the hole.

They claim that "systemd betrays the UNIX philosophy"; it makes things more complex, thus breaking the "do one thing and do it well" principle.

"We contemplate adopting more recent alternatives to sysvinit, but not those undermining the basic design principles of "do one thing and do it well" with a complex collection of dozens of tightly coupled binaries and opaque logs."

Free software programmer Lennart Poettering has been part of his fair share of controversy in the open source community, and his latest essay may raise the most eyebrows yet.

He says in part: "I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets."

Ultimately, in theory, a buyout by Google would protect the company’s control of the Android ecosystem, as Cyanogen’s home-brewed version of Android is potentially the first real threat to ship on phones that Google has encountered.

With this news, Cyanogen is now discussing a Series C round of funding with a few major tech firms and late-stage investors, seeking a valuation close to $1 billion.

Brooks, who is just 22 and a self-taught coder who dropped out of school at 13, was always concerned about privacy and civil liberties.

The program, which he dubbed Ricochet, began as a hobby. But by the time he finished, he had a full-fledged desktop client that was easy to use, offered anonymity and encryption, and even resolved the issue of metadata—the “to” and “from” headers and IP addresses spy agencies use to identify and track communications—long before the public was aware that the NSA was routinely collecting metadata in bulk for its spy programs.

“There is no way you could find my IP address or anything about who I am or where I am. [A]nd the rendezvous point in the middle can’t find out anything about either of us.”

TrueCrypt will stay alive, thanks to devotees who are forking the encryption program's code. 'Cleaned up' code will get a new name, CipherShed, and a different open source license.

"But we are not thinking of adding functionality," he said. "It will be more about stripping functionality - removing old crypto modules that are not sound and so on. But when newer crypto algorithms come along, we will integrate them into the product."