Harrison R. Brown ’12, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at MIT, didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: In exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.

A legal dispute involving model railroad hobbyists has resulted in a major courtroom victory for the free software movement also known as open-source software.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, took several big gambles on Tuesday, betting that he could repeat his success in selling digital music by convincing Hollywood to allow Apple to rent digital movies, while at the same time returning to his original Macintosh roots with an elegant — but limited — ultralight computer called the MacBook Air.

A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.

Twenty-five years ago Steven T. Kirsch ’80, built a better mouse. Now he believes he has found a way to create a better trap — for spam, not mice — if he has enough time to finish his project.