Be careful what you post. Students are getting expelled for what they post on social Web sites. With recent news coverage of the sites and their explosive growth, authorities have taken notice, concerned not only about inappropriate behavior but that kids are making themselves vulnerable to predators. Police recently have investigated several cases involving teens who were sexually assaulted by men they met on these sites. Earlier this week, two men were indicted on federal charges that they used the Internet to have sexual contact with girls from Connecticut.

When IT professionals talk IT salaries, they’re always interested in which job titles are netting the big bucks. Numerous factors come into play when specific salaries are aggregated to create averages, which often are used to identify hot jobs, good opportunities and so forth. Those factors include ones that relate to the individual who earns a salary, such as years of experience, educational background, certifications held and eligibility for (and attainment of) incentive pay. Other factors relate to gross economics such as where jobs are located, the cost of living, demand versus supply for qualified professionals and so forth. Simply put, the same $100,000 salary for two individuals with superficially similar backgrounds means two different things in New York City and in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The ongoing fight for business applications supremacy between Oracle and SAP has technology professionals taking sides. Some think that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s vision and solid track record point to victory for the Redwood City, Calif.-based database giant, while others believe that the NetWeaver platform and battle-tested ERP software give SAP the edge.

Companies seeking BI (business intelligence) success should proceed with caution. At the 2006 Gartner BI summit, analysts shared BI implementation anecdotes from companies that have painted themselves into a corner. "It’s the things you don’t see that will get you," said Ted Friedman, research vice president at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. In a presentation entitled ##"The Five Fatal Flaws of Business Intelligence,"## Friedman and Bill Hostmann, a fellow research vice president, actually outlined seven fatal flaws to avoid. The analysts explained that they had just chosen the most common problems from companies that have "been there, dumb that."

CIOs face too many challenges when they try to deploy mobile devices with business applications, and experts say vendors are missing out on a potentially huge opportunity. Bringing mobile email to employees with a device like BlackBerry isn’t so tough. But when CIOs try to deploy more core business applications to mobile devices, they run into trouble. "There is a notable lack of end-to-end solutions in the market," said Ellen Daley, vice president and research director at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. "What is needed next is a focus on applications beyond wireless e-mail."

Remoba, developer of software solutions for mobile phones, releases its latest build of "Remo." Remo is a software application that provides access to email, contacts, and calendar on every day mobile phones with synchronizing capabilities to your personal or corporate computer. Remo is compatible with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, and Palm Desktop software. The email application accepts POP, POP3, and IMAP formats as well as any Internet based email account such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and gMail. With Remo, regular mobile phones become high-end PDA/Smart Phones for a fraction of the cost.

Everdream Corp., a desktop management company, plans to launch a service "in the near future" that can delete sensitive files on lost or stolen laptops, remotely. Pre-installed software would automatically locate and alert the machine to delete sensitive data the next time the laptop connects to Everdream’s desktop management hosting service through the Internet. Software known as an "agent," communicates via the network every 15 minutes to Everdream’s control center looking for new patches or virus updates. The same process also would allow the software maker to delete files.

FeedForAll announced the release of RSSmesh. RSSmesh is a PHP script that enables webmasters to merge the contents of multiple RSS feeds into a single feed. RSS or Really Simple Syndication, as it is commonly known, is a technology that gives webmasters the ability to easily distribute and publish syndicated content on the Internet. RSSmesh further enhances the abilities of content publishers by allowing them to merge similarly themed RSS feeds into a single feed. The RSSmesh script can be used with any RSS 2.0 feed, and allows webmasters to select the number of items they want to include from each source RSS feed. Advanced caching technology is also built in, caching both the source and destination feeds, resulting in reduced bandwidth usage and increased download speeds.

A Cuban dissident who has been on a hunger strike for 36 days to demand unfettered Internet access is refusing medication and his health is deteriorating rapidly, fellow dissidents said on Wednesday. Guillermo Farinas, a 41-year-old psychologist, went on a hunger strike on January 31 to press Cuba’s Communist authorities to respect his right to freedom of information and allow him Internet access, which is controlled by the government. Farinas was moved to a hospital in his hometown of Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where he is being kept on an IV drip. Cuba, like China, controls access to the Internet. Direct access to the World Wide Web is generally only available to government-approved individuals, but passwords can be purchased on the black market.

IBM announced it won a contract to provide the Department of the Interior with services to standardize and integrate the agency’s financial and business management systems. The deal is valued at more than $110 million over six years. As part of the contract, IBM will help Interior enable an SAP software solution designed to replace the agency’s 80 current finance and business-management efforts with one comprehensive system. That system will be fully integrated and standardized, and will meet all applicable current and future accessibility, security and privacy requirements.