Faster Forward - Technology News, Observations and Occasional Rants by The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro - October 25, 2009

Google's recipe: to serve man?

The odds are pretty good that many of you found this article with the help of a large technology firm based on the West Coast. The odds also suggest that many of you will move on from this page to sites or services operated by the same company -- and...

Cutting costs by cutting the cord: an experiment with free TV

Every time I've written about the annoyances of subscription TV services--like expensive, inflexible programming packages and expensive, inept tuners and recorders--I've seen readers post comments to the effect of "You don't need to put up with that: Ditch your pay service and switch to free, over-the-air TV and free Internet...

Verizon Wireless unveils Droid smartphone

Verizon Wireless may finally have a phone that can win some respect from iPhone fans. This morning, it unveiled the Droid, a Motorola smartphone running the new, 2.0 release of Google's Android software. This device -- shipping Nov. 6 at $199 for new and renewing customers who sign up for...

Answers to more of your Microsoft Security Essentials questions

The state of computing security in Windows is anything but clear for a lot of home users. So I guess I should not have have been surprised that one column and blog posts at the start and end of this month did not suffice to explain Microsoft's new, free Microsoft...

Microsoft to open Outlook data format

Microsoft announced Monday that it plans to pry the locks off the closed, proprietary format of its Outlook e-mail/contacts/calendar/tasks/notes 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...

Facebook updates home page, irks users (again)