Companies and their employees at times face the difficult issue of protecting themselves from cybersmears by anonymous Internet users.

Yesterday was data privacy day, according to Lifehacker, and they posted a number of tips for protecting your privacy.There is one more thing you can do to protect your privacy, though: use open-source software. Open-source, while not inherently more secure, has little chance of containing any backdoors or anything you wouldn't want in your software, since all the code is open.

Do you want completely anonymous internet access? For Free? Tor is the open source leader to anonymous connections on the internet, you can anonymize your internet presence from AIM/ICQ/MSN/ Jabber/IRC/WWW/FTP and you can even issue a torify command at the command prompt to anonymize your wget/ssh/lynx/ftp/perl or whatever

Michelle Murrain is a great example of what the FOSS community is all about. She's complicated: she calls herself a "scientist turned technologist turned theologian turned writer," all blended into one person. She's also an active supporter of and contributor to open source software projects.

If you are one of the increasing number of Internet users that are paranoid about Big Brother watching your activity online, now you can become anonymous with Incognito. Join me as I review this live Linux CD that you can use to protect your identity online.

Packt is pleased to announce details of a new book designed to teach users how to create practical mashups in PHP. Written by experienced programmer Shu-Wai Chow, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects teaches users how to create PHP projects that grab and mix data from the likes of Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!, Last.fm, the Internet UPC Database, and the California Highway Patrol Traffic service!

Everyone wants a piece of you these days: Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing. They'll give you free e-mail, free photo storage, free web hosting, even a free date. They just want to listen in.

For open source, a choice between Google and Microsoft is a false choice.

Yet that’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt is offering, as when he claims a Microsoft-Yahoo combination might “break the Internet” or that the two might act against the openness of the Internet

While privacy and open society advocates have been concerned about the dominance of Google’s search engine for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook’s growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends and colleagues online.