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It was striking that the word “Trojan” was not mentioned in a 52-page report issued by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focusing on the activities of two giant Chinese telecommunications firms, Huawei and ZTE, which have long been suspected of having links to the Chinese government.

A striking map of the paths followed by Stuxnet infection created by researchers at Symantec, the Silicon Valley computer security firm, indicates that Stuxnet actually broke out of Natanz, rather than breaking in. The program acted as a Trojan horse, perhaps delivered first on a USB memory stick, that then spread through computer networks inside the secret facility before spreading to the outside world. Possibly that is why the term Trojan — if it exists in the House report on Huawei and ZTE — is found only in what is reportedly a classified annex that has not been made openly available.

Companies in the cutthroat field of telecommunications received a remarkable marketing document recently, one aimed at causing suspicion about one of their biggest competitors, the Chinese firm Huawei.

“Fear of Huawei spreads globally,” the report reads. “Despite denials, Huawei has struggled to de-link itself from China’s People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese government.” The paper’s author was Huawei’s main U.S. rival, the California-based company Cisco Systems. The marketing campaign got a boost this week when a report from Congress said much the same thing, raising national security concerns about Huawei’s alleged use of its technology to help the Chinese government expand its overseas spying operations. U.S. suspicions surrounding Huawei have presented a business opportunity for Cisco and other firms in the hyper-competitive world of telecom. Senior Hill staffers at three separate congressional offices say an array of American tech firms have lobbied them to increase scrutiny of Huawei, using language similar to Cisco’s campaign. Some analysts say the efforts to discredit Huawei illustrate a wariness among U.S. firms of highly successful, low-priced competitors from China that are roiling telecommunications — once a distinctly American industry.

Most swing voters trust the information they find online, according to a study commissioned by Google. The study found that 62 percent of voters who live in battleground states and who have not made up their minds trust the information they find online. The figure is comparable to the portion who trust information from network news (67 percent) and print newspapers (62 percent). The respondents said it is easier to tell what is true on the Internet than on TV or other sources. The study found that many swing voters use the Internet to fact check the claims made by candidates. Sixty-four percent said they have used the Internet to fact check a candidate, including 34 percent who said they do so weekly. Researchers found that 58 percent of persuadable voters go online to find out more about a candidate's positions and voting record.

The Author's Guild has suffered another major setback in its fight to stop Google's ambitious book-scanning project.

The Guild lost a key ally when Google settled with a coalition of major publishers last week. Now a judge has ruled that the libraries who have provided Google with their books to scan are protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. While the decision doesn't guarantee that Google will win -- that's still to be decided in a separate lawsuit -- the reasoning of this week's decision bodes well for Google's case. Most of the books Google scans for its book program come from libraries. After Google scans each book, it provides a digital image and a text version of the book to the library that owns the original. The libraries then contribute the digital files to a repository called the Hathitrust Digital Library, which uses them for three purposes: preservation, a full-text search engine, and electronic access for disabled patrons who cannot read the print copies of the books. There are four factors the courts consider in fair use cases. Judge Harold Baer sided squarely with the libraries on all four factors.