Say you bought a cellphone. Say you decided you didn't like the look of it much.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could sketch your ideal design, have a buddy knock it up in a 3D modeling program, then see it in the flesh? With OpenMoko's FreeRunner, an open-source linux cellphone, it's a piece of cake: the CAD files are on the net for all to download.

ARM is a British company best known for designing chips for cellphones and licensing them to semiconductor companies. The company’s technology is the most widely used in cellphones, though any company implementing the technology modifies it however it deems best. But now a new effort is under way to exploit this chip technology by creating a standard layer of software.

A la Mobile’s Mobile Security Engine, uses 128-bit AES encryption and digital certificates to protect the operating system.

East African cellphone company, Simba Telecoms last week introduced an innovative local money transfer service in Uganda. The system, developed by Cape Town-based Jeshurun Consulting, was built using a variety of open source tools.

Open standards always cause security problems and Google's OpenSocial API introduced last week is no exception. Not only was an early application based on the standard hacked within minutes, it quickly became evident that OpenSocial is vulnerable and offers an open door to anyone who wants to put a little effort into pushing it open.

"...You see my goal is to not use the FreeRunner as a cellphone, but as a PDA: bbdb, w3m (mainly offline with a WWWOFFLE cache)... Impressions of emacs on a cellphone: ..." -- via It was only a matter of time

"...Recently you have probably read that the Mozilla Corporation is building the embeddable version of Mozilla and a mobile Firefox. In the new and expanded mobile effort the project will create a standards-based open-source browser engine and full open source development stack based on Mozilla technology, optimized for mobile devices, and embeddable on a variety of device targets.

For the first time in history, the Philippine national elections to be held in 2010 will use an automated (electronic) polling system. At this point in time, our lawmakers are now debating on the issue of security of the voting machines that will be used in the polls.

Ubuntu is lovely. KDE is great. Debian is the bomb. Even OS X is pretty hot stuff. But none of them will ever take the desktop. That’s because the desktop is dying and they have already taken the second – soon-to-be central screen – the cellphone and that’s more than enough. Open source is now mobile.