There’s nothing like trashing the competition. And that’s exactly what the Free Software Foundation plans to do on Wednesday, staging a demonstration in Boston where it will encourage businesses to throw away Microsoft Windows in favor of free alternatives.

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Dear Eric Schmidt:

It’s time for you to go.

Not from Google (GOOG); even your biggest detractor would give you credit for the technological marvel and prosperous business you have helped create in Mountain View. But your position on Apple’s (AAPL) board of directors now looks completely untenable given Google’s intention to release a lightweight operating system for personal computers called Chrome OS.

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Michael Dell gets a lot of the credit for pioneering the direct sale of PCs to the public. The reality is that there is a legion of now long-forgotten mail order entrepreneurs who came along earlier. He just did it better than all the rest. So it was with more than usual interest that I read a piece published by InternetNews.com earlier this week in which Dell’s (DELL) eponymous company claimed that sales alerts on Twitter had resulted in about $1 million in sales.

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Along with the vulnerabilities posed by the flaws for which Microsoft released patches on Tuesday, users of the software giant’s products have a new obstacle to grapple with: a fake notification mailing that looks remarkably legitimate.

Attackers are apparently taking advantage of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday to send legitimate-looking mailings to Microsoft customers that include a Trojan virus called Trojan.Backdoor.Haxdoor that could allow attackers to execute files and steal information from compromised computers. The fake mailing includes a legitimate-looking PGP signature, as well as purporting to come from a real Microsoft employee.

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State legislators look at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and other digital download services stealing away business from offline retailers and you know what they see? A piggybank.

News.com reports today that at least nine states this year have considered enacting “download taxes” on digital goods–and five of those states have adopted them, including Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana and Utah. Similar laws are already on the books in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

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You thought it was bad getting tossed aside for another woman? Try getting rejected for an MP3 player.

A new dating series based on the notion that “boys love their toys” will pit girls against gadgets in an attempt to answer that age-old question: hottie or hot HDTV? In a twist on the reality TV staple “For Love or Money,” Playboy TV’s “Gadget or the Girl” will make contestants choose between a weekend getaway with a girl of their choice or a surprise high-tech toy.

The gear will range from a 60-inch plasma TV to an arcade game machine, but the guy won’t know what his prize is until he opts for either the gadget or the girl.

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The security issues we face today in cyberspace are the same ones the country faced during the American Civil War when Abe Lincoln was relying on telegraph transmissions to help keep the country united, a top U.S. cybersecurity official said in a keynote speech at the Black Hat security conference here Thursday.

Lincoln was obsessed with reading telegrams that delivered updates from the battlefield, using them to learn about the military strategies and to offer feedback, said Rod Beckstrom, director of the National Cyber Security Center in the Department of Homeland Security.

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Kevin Mitnick knows that the weakest link in any security system is the person holding the information.

As a young fugitive hacker, he went to jail for breaking into computer networks, more often by using his cunning and persuasion than his tech skills. He was an early master of the science of social engineering–manipulating people into doing what you want, such as giving out passwords and other information that unlocks sensitive information on networks.

Mitnick and a panel of other hackers discussed their social engineering pranks and gave live demonstrations at the live HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference late on Saturday.

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Just three years ago, she was one of “three chicks with credit cards” trying to form a consortium of female bloggers.

Now, former CNN journalist Lisa Stone is championing a network of 2,200 blogs in a fresh strategic partnership with iVillage, taking on a new $5 million investment from iVillage-parent NBC Universal, and playing host to as many as eight blog-publishing conferences this year around the country. This Friday, the BlogHer conference in San Francisco is expected to attract as many as 3,000 bloggers, some of them mothers driving across the country via caravan while blogging about their trip. (Stone co-founded BlogHer in February 2005 with Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins.)

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If you thought gas prices were rising too quickly, check out what’s been happening to text messaging. Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. This percentage of increase is on par with similar price hikes at the gas pump as crude oil prices skyrocket. In 2005, Americans paid on average about $2.27 per gallon for gas compared with more than $4 a gallon today.

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Talk about cross-promotion.

One of the closest things to Disney World’s Orlando, Fla., home, is NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and this is relevant because on Friday, it was announced that among the objects expected to be blasted into the sky with the planned Saturday launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery is a figurine of Toy Story space ranger Buzz Lightyear.

Disney World, of course, is where the new Toy Story Mania ride has just opened.

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Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.

Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.

Twitter’s friendly API allows applications to be built on top of it (when the site is up), letting FriendFeed and other services tap into the Twitter stream. In addition, FriendFeed allows users to comment on the contents of the aggregated feeds and has “rooms” for discussions among a group of people.

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The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups. The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. That’s because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter, is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.

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In the mid-1990s, America Online was enjoying exponential growth when it almost came a cropper. AOL’s infrastructure wasn’t able to support the increasing crush of new customers, and the online company soon developed an annoying habit of being offline too often. I remember a senior company exec at the time describing how the top brass was caught off guard by the seemingly sudden avalanche of complaints and negative coverage in the press. It was as if someone flipped a switch, and AOL went from darlings to dolts.

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If you’re still wondering why the media world is getting turned on its head, consider the following anecdote. A few years back, representatives from the Industry Standard, Wired and Upside were invited to a public-relations gathering to talk about how they decide what to cover. After they finished their prepared remarks, a young woman in the audience stood up to ask a question. “You talk a lot about tricks and tips on what we should do,” she said. “But I’ve done all that and I still can’t get you to cover my clients.” The reporter from Upside recognized the opening and rammed a Mack Truck right through it. “Ma’am,” he replied, “you need better clients.”

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