Data thieves may have plundered Social Security numbers and other private information–including health records–belonging to students and faculty at Ohio University following three separate computer intrusions at the school. According to a message posted on the school’s Web site, more than 200,000 people may have been victimized, including past and present students as well as school employees. Administrators also suggested that more thefts may be uncovered as investigators continue to review computer systems campuswide.

Identity Forge, provider of identity management solutions which integrate host-based systems with distributed Identity Management Platforms, announced the general availability of IdF Virtual Gateway 2.5. This product upgrade includes substantial enhancements to the IdF Virtual Gateway, plus a number of significant features expanding functionality and integration credentials of host-based systems into modern identity management infrastructures. IdF technology provides provisioning, synchronizes host-based identity credentials, passwords, host permissions, and host user data for secure, shared resources across the enterprise. The new IdF Gateway 2.5 release compliments its cutting edge IBM RACF, CA ACF2, CA Top Secret, and IBM System i5, iSeries, AS/400 adapters.

A new survey of more than 3,000 people–conducted by SWNS on behalf of online learning provider, SkillSoft–reveals which professions are the most stressful and what things lead people to feeling stressed stress at work. IT experts are more likely to suffer from stress than any other professional, according to the survey. A staggering 97 percent of people working in IT claim to find their life at work stressful on a daily basis. Four out of five IT consultants feel stressed before they even enter the workplace, in anticipation of another day juggling complaints, pressure from managers and daily targets. And a quarter of IT experts are under such enormous pressure to perform at work they have taken time off suffering with stress. The poll also revealed that a third of IT professionals say it is difficult to get the work done when managers are constantly on their backs.

President Bush said Thursday the government is "not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" with a reported program to create a massive database of U.S. phone calls. "The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Bush said in a statement he read to reporters at the White House. "Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates." Bush’s comments followed a USA Today report Thursday that telecommunications giants AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon have provided the National Security Agency with billions of records of domestic phone calls beginning shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Symantec executives and customers extolled the virtue of "standards" on May 9 at the Symantec Vision conference, as the company introduced its bid to provide that standard, a soup-to-nuts integrated process solution for the data center. Dubbed the Data Center Foundation, the package includes four families of products: Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Server Foundation and Veritas i3 application performance management tools. These products span backup and remote replication of data, storage management, server provisioning and management functions, and application performance tuning and analysis.

As Linksys, the home-networking and consumer division of Cisco Systems, enters the next phase of growth, the company is bringing in a new leader. On Thursday, Cisco plans to announce that J. Michael Pocock, the former CEO of Polaroid, has been appointed to the position of Linksys senior vice president and general manager. Victor Tsao and Janie Tsao, Linksys founders who have shared this title since 2003, will now focus their efforts on new opportunities in China for Cisco.

A British computer expert accused by Washington of the world’s "biggest military hack of all time" should be extradited to the United States to stand trial, a court ruled on Wednesday. Gary McKinnon, 40, was arrested last June following charges by U.S. prosecutors that he illegally accessed 97 government computers–including Pentagon, U.S. Army, Navy and NASA systems–causing $700,000 worth of damage. Britain’s Home Secretary will make the final decision on deportation. McKinnon, whose hacking name was "Solo," has admitted gaining access to U.S. government computers but denies causing any damage.

A poster on Ask Slashdot requested advice on how to reduce or turn down requests for technical support requests, especially from users who aren’t necessarily clients. The resulting responses–421 and counting–responses ranged from predictably snarky, to some practical recommendations that could be enlisted by any IT professional overwhelmed by a client’s demands. The most common piece of advice from those who answered the request was that an IT professional should never, ever work for free.

Teamstudio Consulting, a division of Teamstudio, announced Teamstudio Policy Manager now supports IBM iSeries and AIX platforms. Teamstudio Policy Manager provides Lotus Notes/Domino users with a simplified process for enforcing wide scale security settings. A server based application, it allows users to efficiently correct pre-existing application security flaws and automatically secures the configuration across entire Lotus Notes/Domino AIX and iSeries platforms.

Novell is readying two major product launches meant to make its open-source software more palatable to corporate customers. Later this month, Novell will officially unveil Bandit, an open-source identity management project that was quietly started earlier this year, Chief Technology Officer Jeff Jaffe told CNET News.com. Then in July, Novell will ship a major upgrade to its Linux desktop suite, called Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Jaffe said.