In a move that alleviates some privacy concerns, a federal judge granted part of a Justice Department request for Google search data but said users’ search queries were off-limits. The 21-page order issued Friday in San Jose, by U.S. District Judge James Ware, represented little change from his stance at an earlier hearing.

At Microsoft, it’s no longer just about bits and bytes. The company has for years marketed its products to the tech elite within big companies. Now Microsoft is making concerted effort to speak the language of top executives. Why? Because business managers, marketing executives and other nontechies are increasingly involved in technology purchasing decisions, Microsoft argues. Another reason for the shift is IBM. Microsoft’s chief rival in the business software area has been pitching to CEOs for years, relying on its business-savvy consultants to help win deals. In essence, Microsoft needs to speak Big Blue’s language.

Several news reports suggest Time Warner plans to resurrect its once high-flying Netscape division by turning it into a social networking hub. Media tracker Paid Content.org says the Netscape name is soon to be attached to a social networking Web site, in which news stories and other items can be freely traded. In order to do this, over the last few weeks Netscape owner Time Warner has fired some of its Netscape-focused employees and plans to install a new director, Jason Calacanis, according to the ValleyWag Web site. Time Warner owns Weblogs, which Calacanis runs.

The U.S. arm of credit and debit card giant Visa International has issued an alert for flaws in cash-register software made by Fujitsu Transaction Solutions that could put sensitive cardholder information at risk. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the bug can cause the inadvertent storage of customer data–including secret PINs–within the point-of-sale software installed in retail locations. The report said Visa USA sent the warning to "merchant acquirers" that process card transactions for some of the biggest names in retail and urged users to apply a software upgrade from Fujitsu to fix the flaw. Officials from Visa USA and Fujitsu could not be reached for comment at press time but, according to the newspaper, the confidential alert was sent several days ago to raise awareness about the bug.

On Thursday, computer giant Lenovo said it would cut 5 percent of its staff, or 1,000 positions, as part of a restructuring plan that will cost the company some $100 million in charges, Reuters reports. The restructure will merge the company’s global sales and back office support functions, and Lenovo expects annual savings of roughly $250 million as a result.

What comes after open-source software? Open services, said Sun Microsystems Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos. Open services provide freedom for service developers and represent a place where open-source-based services can be shared and executed, Papadopoulos said. In an open services development scenario, developers work on common patterns for service levels and management, he said. And developers will "not just publish code but prototypical services, too," he added.

Most businesses are not doing enough to secure their networks against identity fraud, a UK government survey says. Growing numbers of firms are using strong authentication to restrict unauthorized access, according to the Department of Trade and Industry. But large companies still recorded a small increase in identity-related security breaches during 2005. The DTI is urging firms to install multi-layered security systems and not to rely entirely on password access.

One in three workers thinks the time he spent in his last training session probably would have been better spent elsewhere, according to a survey by Hudson, a staffing and consulting services company. Among these workers, 12 percent think the training was a complete waste of their time. Although the poll did not ask the 1,674 respondents what their jobs were, Rose Pagliari, an associate director with Hudson’s Learning and Development Group, says the results are relevant to IT workers.

Mid-market enterprise resource planning software developer Lawson Software announced March 15 the next iteration of its namesake suite of applications, Release 9–an upgrade that’s stacked on IBM’s middleware platform to help both Lawson and its users evolve to a service-oriented architecture. Lawson announced at its CUE user conference last year that it would standardize on IBM’s middleware platform moving forward. It’s done that with Release 9, which includes IBM’s WebSphere Application Server ND 6.0, Tivoli Directory Server 6.0 and DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Edition 8.2–though the latter two implementations are optional.

A former security guard at General Motors’ Warren technical center is accused of taking employee Social Security numbers and using them to hack into the company’s employee vehicle database. James S. Green II, 35, of Washington Township, found out what company cars the employees drove and sent them bogus emails asking them their thoughts on the vehicles. Green was arraigned Monday on eight counts of obtaining, possessing or transferring personal identity information, one count of using a computer to commit a crime and one count of stalking that was unrelated to the GM cases. He was released after posting 10 percent of a $50,000 bond.