Wireless broadband has become a common, useful tool for many people. Toyota has recognized this by introducing a 2010 Prius outfitted with wireless built-in broadband connection. It's like having a smart phone on wheels.

Maybe there's something in the air. After the recent news that Microsoft is going to publish the documentation of the PST file format used by Outlook, there is now an article in Wired reporting that Sequoia Voting Systems will publish the source code for their new optical-scan voting system. This is, in its own way, as noteworthy as the announcements of Microsoft's new openness; Sequoia historically has fought tooth and nail to keep its source code and other details of its systems secret.

Evegeny Morozov over at Foreign Policy recently shared this story from the Russian site InfoX.ru, which reports that Russia is considering technical filtering options. ONI research has not found technical filtering in Russia to date, so if this plan goes through it could be one of the first known instances of technical filtering in Russia.

The net neutrality fight is on, as FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's proposal for new rules moved on to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Now, the two sides are digging in: AT&T, telcos, and unions on one side; Google and content providers on the other. I tend to favor protecting end-to-end in the Internet context, but I'm a bit worried about what the net neutrality rules will look like in practice.

Almost since the first time-sharing computer was accessed with a dumb terminal, a phone line, and a modem, maintaining the security of remote access has been the concern of system administrators. We use passwords, of course, but these suffer from a number of potential problems, as I've discussed before. Two-factor authentication schemes have been used in an attempt to bolster security, but they can be attacked, too.

I'm sure most readers are familiar with the story of the Trojan Horse, told most notably in Virgil's Latin epic, The Aeneid, in which the Greeks used a clever trick " a giant horse with soldiers hidden inside " to overcome the city of Troy. In the computing world of today, a Trojan Horse is a malicious program disguised as a program that does something useful.

There is a pernicious bit of contract law theory called "efficient breach", beloved of unscrupulous capitalists, "the view that a party should be allowed to breach a contract and pay damages, if doing so would be more economically efficient than performing under the contract". But would they want long-term homeless folk reading Posner, breaching not a contract to supply widgets, but the social contract?

Both Great Britain and the United States have long traditions of letting individuals write wills to determine who owns their property when they die. However, most other countries in Europe consider it both remarkable and close to barbaric to allow parents to disinherit their children; indeed, in 26 of 27 European Union countries, a large part of the estate of the deceased is reserved in equal shares for surviving children.

Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post has a new blog post about Microsoft's announced intention to publish the specification of the Personal Storage Table (.pst) file format used by its Outlook E-mail and personal information management application. By documenting the workings of Outlook's Personal Storage Table (PST) format"one of my least-favorite locked formats"Microsoft would make it far easier for developers to write Outlook-compatible software to complement or replace that widely used program.

Having a loved one who is struggling with drug addiction or alcoholism can be an overwhelming situation to navigate. Figuring out what kind of help might work, then finding the program that will fit your needs while having to keep in mind your financial budget is difficult.

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