It didn’t take long for the idea of forcing Internet providers to retain records of their users’ activities to gain traction in the U.S. Congress. Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a Republican, gave a speech saying that data retention by Internet service providers is an "issue that must be addressed." Child pornography investigations have been "hampered" because data may be routinely deleted, Gonzales warned. Now, in a demonstration of bipartisan unity, a Democratic member of the Congressional Internet Caucus is preparing to introduce an amendment–perhaps during a U.S. House of Representatives floor vote next week–that would make such data deletion illegal.

Health insurer Aetna said a laptop computer containing personal information on about 38,000 of its members was stolen from an employee’s car. The data includes names, addresses and Social Security numbers, spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said. No personal banking information or health claim data was on the laptop, she added. The members are employees of two companies that are Aetna customers, the company said in a statement. Michener said the two companies had asked that their names not be disclosed.

IBM plans to sell a lower-cost version of its z9 mainframe computer aimed at midsize businesses and emerging markets such as China. The System z9 Business Class mainframe will be priced from about US$100,000, IBM said. A shipping date wasn’t immediately available. IBM’s existing mainframes, aimed at big corporations and government users, are priced from around $250,000 up to several million dollars.

A new kind of malware circulating on the Internet freezes a computer and then asks for a ransom paid through the Western Union Holdings money-transfer service. A sample of the Trojan horse virus was sent to Sophos, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant. The malware, which Sophos named Troj/Ransom-A, is one of only a few viruses so far that has asked for a ransom in exchange for releasing control of a computer, Cluley said.

There’s been one question that has been asked over and over again by Notes developers: "How can I parameterise a Notes view selection?" The answer was always "You can’t" because it is the server that maintains the view, and at the time the server does the view, there’s no opportunity to customise a view for one particular user. Ah, but you can and Senior Technical Editor Mick Moignard will show you how.

Read this DominoPower article.

Long seen as a method to maximize employment opportunities and salaries in the post-dot-com-bust era, a study finds that pay for certified IT skills falls short of the pay for non-certified skills. The Q1 2006 Hot Technical Skills and Certifications Pay Index found that pay premiums for non-certified IT skills grew three times faster than for certified ones in a six-month period spanning 2005-2006. The study suggests that there has been a change in employers’ acceptance of the value of non-certified tech skills versus certifications in maintaining competitive pay for their workers.

Intel wants to lay a virtual trap for hackers. The chip maker, which launched its vPro brand for business desktops April 24, aims to increase PC security by stepping up the vPro machines’ abilities to proactively guard against malware. The company will employ virtualization technology–which can partition a PC to run different types of software simultaneously–to set up a new type of security checkpoint inside each machine.

IBM is working on a project, called QEDwiki, that takes a stab at a long-held industry promise: end-user programming. Rod Smith, IBM’s vice president of emerging technology, plans to talk about QEDwiki and Big Blue’s growing fondness for scripting languages, a relatively lightweight approach to writing applications, at a PHP Web development conference. The idea behind QEDwiki, which stands for quick and easily done wiki, is that business people can create their own Web pages by dragging and dropping components onto a pallet, Smith said.

Internet identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the U.S. today. For five straight years, the Federal Trade Commission ranked it as one of the most-reported types of fraud. Despite the increasing awareness of identity theft among consumers and financial institutions, the identity-theft racket shows no signs of slowing. Reported losses from identity theft, currently responsible for over 40 percent of all fraud complaints, approached nearly $300 million last year.

Build an IBM Lotus Sametime bot that works with IBM WebSphere Translation Server to translate text strings on-the-fly. Use the Lotus Sametime Java toolkit, the WebSphere Translation Server Java API, IBM’s public Sametime server, and the IBM Community Tools client for development and testing.