All Estonians can vote online using their digital ID card.

European Parliament

Estonia, which created the world’s first nationwide Internet-based voting system, has finally released its source code to the public in an attempt to assuage a longstanding concern by critics.

"This is the next step toward a transparent system,” said Tarvi Martens, chairman of Estonia's Electronic Voting Committee, in an interview Friday with ERR, Estonia’s national broadcaster. “The idea, which was the result of joint discussion between numerous Estonian IT experts and the Electronic Voting Committee, was implemented today. We welcome the fact that experts representing civil society want to contribute to the development and security of the e-elections.”

Martens and his colleagues have now put the entire source code on GitHub—previously it was only made available after signing a confidentiality agreement.

The landing site of NASA's Apollo missions may be transformed into a popular tourist destination, if a new bill in Congress is ratified. Two democratic congresswomen are seeking designate a national park on the moon, protecting abandoned Apollo artifacts, such as the landing gear, roving hardware, and the famous footprints.

The last manned lunar landing was in 1972, and no human has stepped foot on the surface of the moon since. But that might not be the case much longer as other countries and commercial space programs seek to replicate NASA's past successes.

The bill, dubbed the "Apollo Lunar Landing Legacy Act," was designed to specifically account for public access and tourism. Both visitor and administrative services are to be designated "within reasonable proximity to the Historical Park," and hint at a possible future of moon landing tours and public amenities.

The park is specifically designed to attract tourists

The wording of the bill carefully takes into account the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prevents countries from staking claim to any part of the moon. Instead, the individual items left from the various Apollo missions, not the land, will be considered a national park, thus circumventing the territory issue while still protecting the historic items. Additionally, the lunar landing site would be submitted to the United Nations in a move to seek designation as World Heritage Site, thus providing global protection.

The national park proposal may seem unusual, but commercial lunar travel may be possible in the not-too-distant future. Golden Spike, a private space travel company, has expressed a commitment to establishing commercial flights to the moon by 2020, and other space programs are also nearing lunar travel capabilities. The Apollo 11 landing site is an artifact from the first human contact with a celestial body, and seeking to preserve the location prior to an influx of traffic may be a smart move.

By Craig Pearson on July 12th, 2013 at 9:00 am.

My Team Fortress 2 addiction, which is now mostly in hand thanks for asking, used to be fueled by Valve’s updates. The magnificent teases that they were, they’d hold my attention with week-long pieces of performance art. The mighty clang when everything finally dropped and was unwrapped was the best thing ever. Now, with the community contributions happening in plain sight in the Workshop, that seems to be lost. We know what’s going to be in the game, and Valve have said things will be added more swiftly. So we’ve probably seen the end of things like the Spy uncloaking during the Sniper reveal. Last night’s update, even with two new maps and over 60 new community addons, arrived instead with a quiet thump. And another. And another. Wait, that’s my heart…

I do want those Gabe glasses. They look magnificent. This nameless update’s additions, which includes hats, jackets, maps, and new crates and keys, aren’t as interesting as the vast rebalancing exercise that’s taken place. They’ve gone through each map and fixed as many exploits as they could. They’ve also rerolled a few underused weapons, or rebalanced overused weapons. Here’s how the approached the Dead Ringer’s overuse.

Let’s look at another example with the opposite problem: The Dead Ringer. At roughly 80%, the equip rate for the Dead Ringer is staggeringly high. Given the many other items available in this category, this means that players feel they don’t have any other viable option but choosing the Dead Ringer. We’ve gotten emails from players who describe the item as frustrating to fight against, requiring too little skill from the Spies and too much from their opponents.

In our next update, the Dead Ringer will work generally the same way it always has, letting Spies feign death to escape from damage that would have otherwise killed them. However, now any damage the Spy takes after his “death” will decrease the maximum length of time he can spend cloaked. This gives any players chasing the Spy more of an opportunity to catch up and deal a real finishing blow, while also requiring more skill from any Spy trying to make his way to actual safety.

I’m no longer a regular TF2 player, so I’ll be unable to comprehensively detail what the full effect of these changes will be, but forgotten things like Dalokohs Bar getting a touch up and tc_hydro being tweaked suggests it’s fairly comprehensive. Want to see the new maps?

This is cp_standin.

And this is cp_process.

In December 2008, there was an emergency meeting at Microsoft that those present reportedly nicknamed the "cage match." Terry Myerson, a young executive with a blunt affect and a love of Hawaiian shirts, had just been promoted to head of mobile engineering. At the time, that meant Windows Mobile, the aging, touch-unfriendly mobile operating system that Microsoft first released in 2003.

Myerson called the meeting. On the table was a prototype of a new Windows Mobile phone. On everyone’s mind was Apple’s iPhone, which had blown the market away the previous year. Myerson wanted to know whether any of Microsoft’s code could be saved. No one would leave the room until that question was answered, he said.

Seven hours later, the group had reached a tentative consensus: toss it all out and start over.

Toss it all and start over

The decision to design a new mobile operating system from scratch was a difficult one, and it gave Google an edge in introducing Android. But it turned out to be a huge feather in Myerson’s cap. The new Windows Phone was well-designed — if a bit light on functionality at first — and earned critical praise even as sales were faint.

Less than two years after the cage match, Myerson was promoted to head the entire Windows Phone group. Myerson "played a key and highly successful role... by leading the engineering work on Windows Phone 7 and 7.5," CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in an internal memo announcing the change. "We have tremendous potential with Windows Phone."

Myerson’s ascent continued this week when Microsoft announced that the 40-year-old has been promoted to lead the most lucrative and crucial of the company’s four new technology divisions: the "operating systems engineering group." Basically that means Windows, the operating system that made Microsoft most of its money and now appears not just on PCs, but also in various derivatives on phones, tablets, PCs, and the Xbox. In other words, the backbone of everything Microsoft does.

The choice of Myerson over rising star Julie Larson-Green, who was head of engineering for Windows and now will head up the hardware group, may raise some eyebrows. Larson-Green is known for her poise and diplomacy, while Myerson crumples under the spotlight and is ungenerous with the press. On a conference call yesterday, The Verge asked a question about how the two will work together. Larson-Green jumped in with a sunny corporate answer immediately. Myerson hung back until he was called out by name, then gave a meandering response about innovation coming from Microsoft’s partners.

The choice of Myerson over rising star Julie Larson-Green may raise some eyebrows

Myerson can also be a bit ungracious. He’s called Android and wondered on stage if Apple is "running out of steam, is iOS getting boring?" He trashed the competition again in an interview with Wired, in which he said Android is "confusing" and "chaos" and Apple is authoritarian.

Then there is the troubling fact that Windows Phone is good, but it’s not popular. Sales lag far behind iPhone and Android. The app selection is comparatively meager; Windows Phone has around 160,000 apps while its competitors have more than 800,000 each. The Windows Phone platform has also been criticized for being slow to roll out updates. After two years of Myerson rule, Windows Phone has yet to fully reach the "tremendous potential" Ballmer was so hopeful about.

Myerson never planned to work at Microsoft. He spent one semester at Trinity, the college of arts and sciences at Duke University, before transferring to a mechanical engineering major. In college, he waited tables and worked part time doing graphical simulations for the Environmental Protection Agency. After graduating, he took a job in the computer graphics industry until he became seduced by the lure of the internet and quit to start his own company, Interse Corporation.

The 24-year-old Myerson personally earned $16.5 million worth of stock

Interse built websites, and later, data mining software. It only took two years before it caught Bill Gates’ eye, and a sale closed soon after. The company was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an undisclosed price, although public records show that the 24-year-old Myerson personally received about $16.5 million worth of stock.

Myerson took a supporting job in "internet services business unit within the server applications division" and worked on Site Server, Windows Management Instrumentation, and BizTalk, among other products. He joined the group for Microsoft Exchange, the corporate email, contacts, and calendar software, in 2001 and led that team for eight years.

In 2009, mobile chief Andy Lees tapped Myerson to help revitalize the mobile group in the face of the iPhone threat. One of his first major hires was Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore, who was largely responsible for the design of the new operating system.

Myerson had one other major victory as mobile chief, which likely paved the way for his promotion. Microsoft managed to build a good, some might say great, mobile operating system, but it didn’t have any killer phones. Furthermore, carriers were promoting Apple and Samsung phones to their customers, leaving Microsoft’s offerings to wither on the shelf.

Jo Harlow, Nokia’s executive vice president of smart devices, also went to Duke, and she and Myerson became close. He was instrumental in building Microsoft’s partnership with the Scandanavian handset maker. Since then, Nokia has become Microsoft’s closest ally in mobile. Teams from the two companies evenwent snowshoeing together in Finland.

Myerson was instrumental in building Microsoft's partnership with Nokia

Myerson is a company man; his younger brother even works at Microsoft. But his awkward public persona and partial failure on Windows Phone could hold him back. Promoting synergy between all the products that run Windows is a top priority for Microsoft now, based on the company’s rhetoric this week. But actually uniting the disparate products has proved a substantial challenge so far, to the point that some developers are wondering if it’s just talk.

It’s widely believed that Lees, Myerson’s benefactor and predecessor in the mobile group, was thrown under the bus. With all the challenges facing Microsoft, and the coming adjustment period after such a drastic reorganization, Myerson will have to sprint hard to avoid that fate.