Cory Doctrow reports:

Ian Hogben discovered that his HP laptop stores a whitelist of allowed Mini-PCI cards in its BIOS. If the WiFi card you buy isn't on the whitelist, your laptop won't boot. The anticompetitive implications for this are stunning: if you don't go to HP on bent knee before shipping your cards, they'll lock them out of their hardware and none of their customers will be able to use your card. Not to mention what happens when new cards are invented after your laptop leaves the factory: sorry, no modern hardware for you, your laptop only works with museum pieces. [Original story.]

Cory is absolutely right. While your car's owners manual says that the dealer's power steering fluid is recommended, everyone knows that the dealer's fluids are more expensive and are probably just re-branded versions of regular products, anyway. Now, imagine a dystopic future in which your car wouldn't function unless it was using only the fluids specified by the dealer. You'd get super-pissed! That's exactly what's happening here. Microsoft got busted for this kind of practice ("Either you include our Internet browser or we're taking away your license to sell Windows"). Hopefully HP will, too.