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Whether it be the North Korean state engaging in cyber espionage, hacktivist collectives, cyber mafia groups or the tooth fairy whodunnit, what many people feel about the recent break in and disclosure of internal documents at the Sony Corporation is schadenfreude.

It couldn't happen to a better bunch of folks.

The Sony Corporation would like us all to forget their shameful history of secretly installing rootkit malware on millions of computers running Microsoft Windows. It was all part of Sony's effort to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on people who had purchased Sony music CDs.

Dmytri Kleiner, author of the Telekommunist Manifesto, offers us this new spin on the old Christmas game of "Secret Santa."

Inspired by the Tor Project (The Onion Router) for anonymizing web surfing, the "Crypto Santa" game provides us with a way to further anonymize our Secret Santa gift-giving at our own holiday gatherings of friends, co-workers or family members.

Microsoft's "Windows XP" operating system, first introduced in August, 2001 reaches its official "end of life" on April 8, 2014.

After that, Microsoft will stop issuing patches, bug fixes and updates for this 13-year-old computer operating system. At present, depending on whose statistics you believe, 20 to 30 per cent of the world's PCs are still running Windows XP.

Every time a mainstream news media outlet bans "anonymous" online comments a debate opens up somewhere about the nature of online anonymity.

Recently the Huffington Post made a decision to move in this direction starting next month. Despite its leftish pretensions, the Huffington Post is part of a multimillion-dollar online publishing empire. It was purchased by AOL two years ago for $315 million.

For some time now, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the non-governmental organization that governs the web has been working on a new set of standards called “HTML5”.

When done properly, standards are a good thing. Having standards means that no matter what web browser or computer you're using, you can view and interact with content on the web.

Over the years, one of the things that has been particularly irritating, has been the requirement for computer users to install various third party browser “plug-ins” in order to view certain types of content. Often, these plug-ins, although “free of charge,” are not free in the freedom sense.

What big media corporations call “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) and digital freedom activists refer to as “Digital Restrictions Management” has long been the toxic sludge of digital music, video and e-books.

With DRM, corporations impose digital locks on digital media and on digital devices that restrict what you can and can't do with that media or device.

In 2005, Sony BMG used DRM software on their music CDs, that secretly installed a rootkit on computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system that seriously compromised the security of countless numbers of machines.

Guest post by Michelle Langlois

I got a new smartphone seven months ago, and it's a pretty handy little gadget. I'll never get lost again since I have a map that can pinpoint my location down to whether I'm in the front or back of my house. I downloaded a banking app that lets me check my balance, pay bills, and transfer funds whenever I want to do it. And, of course, I can tweet, foursquare, play Frozen Bubble, and watch YouTube any time I like.

What if Microsoft demanded a 30 per cent cut of your speaking fees if you happened to make use of a PowerPoint presentation in your talk? What if you used Photoshop to edit your photos and Adobe only allowed you to sell your creations through their online photo store? Sound crazy? That's what Apple is up to with their new iBook Author software.

The first 10,000 Raspberry Pis will be coming off the assembly line in the next few weeks. What's a Raspberry Pi, you ask?

It's a little $25 single-board computer that's about as powerful as a typical smartphone. The project is the brainchild of Eben Upton of Cambridge University who co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation is a registered charity in the U.K.

While the first batch of Raspberry Pis are expected to be snatched up by hackers, computer geeks and electronics hobbyists, the ultimate aim of the project is to get these cheap little computers into the hands of schoolkids.