Are you increasingly using public Wi-Fi hotspots? If you are, you're in good company, as many more people use public Wi-Fi for work and play. Airports, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, conference centers and many more types of locations are Wi-Fi enabled. Many hotspot hotspot users, though, don't take the right steps to secure their sessions. In this post, you'll find six tips and applications--including both open source and freeware offerings--that you can use to lock down your sessions.

Is open source finally making sense to Microsoft? Jeremy LaCroix sees a number of reasons to believe so. He notes that within only six months, the company has contributed 20,000 lines of code to the Linux community, given away countless copies of Windows 7, launched its CodePlex foundation, and announced that it is opening up the .PST data format behind Microsoft Outlook. I think it will be a long time before Microsoft fully wakes up to the benefits of open source, but some divisions hear the call, and more will over time.

This week, the European Commission announced its preliminary satisfaction with a settlement offer proposed by Microsoft that would end an antitrust battle that has been simmering for over 10 years. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith posted a response that said: "We welcome today’s announcement by the European Commission to move forward with formal market testing of Microsoft’s proposal relating to web browser choice in Europe. We also welcome the opportunity to take the next step in the process regarding our proposal to promote interoperability with a broad range of our products.”

As Smith alludes to, a big part of the proposed settlement has to do with Microsoft including a browser ballot window in Internet Explorer that lists a broad array of browsers and allows users to choose which one to use. Opponents of that proposal, including Mozilla and Opera, have criticized the fact that the ballot screen is found within Internet Explorer, which is still bundled with Windows, and the fact that any alternative browser must be downloaded, which many users will be too lazy to do. So why are Mozilla and Opera being so reticent in the wake of the European announcement?