IBM announced that the iF International Forum Design is awarding IBM sixteen Design Innovation Awards for superior products and solutions, giving IBM the most awards of any competing company. The iF product design awards will be formally presented to IBM at the CeBIT 2006 exhibition in Hanover, Germany on March 9.

Symantec has quietly pulled the plug on sales of L0phtCrack, the venerable password auditing and recovery application. The decision to discontinue support for L0phtCrack, also known as LC5, comes just months after Symantec stopped selling the application to customers outside the United States and Canada out of concerns that it violated cryptography export controls.

On Tuesday, two shareholders sued Hewlett-Packard, alleging that the company violated its policy on executive compensation when it doled out some $21.4 million for former chief executive Carleton S. Fiorina’s severance package. Fiorina was forced to resign in February 2005, after the company accused her of failing to boost its stock following a merger with Compaq. The lawsuit says HP violated company policy when it paid Fiorina more than a shareholder-approved limit restricting severance to 2.99 times the executive’s base pay, plus a bonus, The Times reports. The groups want Fiorina to repay the money she was given.

Chief information officers at U.S. government agencies say they’ve made progress on several key issues, including IT security and modernizing their IT infrastructure, but still face major challenges in security and other areas, according to a survey released Tuesday. Government CIOs told interviewers sent by the ITAA (Information Technology Association of America) they’ve made progress in establishing IT security as a priority, expanding security awareness among staff and, in several cases, appointing a chief security officer, according to the survey. But IT security and privacy remain federal CIO’s top concerns, said Paul Wohlleben, a partner at Grant Thornton LLP, which compiled the survey for ITAA.

"Computer terrorist" Kevin Mitnick is one of the world’s most famous computer hackers and became a cause celebre after breaking into networks and stealing software at companies including Sun Microsystems and Motorola. Now Mitnick travels the world teaching companies how to guard against people just like him. He argues that while sophisticated technology can help keep networks clean from viruses, it is useless if hackers can con a company’s employees into handing over passwords by posing, for example, as colleagues.

Here’s a real caffeine jolt–heart attacks might be a risk for coffee drinkers with a common genetic trait that makes caffeine linger in their bodies, a study suggests. Research on more than 4,000 people in Costa Rica found that about half had the trait and were considered "slow caffeine metabolizers." The other half had the opposite trait, which caused their bodies to rapidly break down or metabolize caffeine, and coffee-drinking in this group appeared to reduce heart attack risks. Among slow-metabolizers, those who drank two or more cups of coffee daily were at least 36% more likely to have a non-fatal heart attack than those who drank little or no coffee. Even higher risks were found for younger slow metabolizers–those under 50. They were up to four times more likely to have a heart attack than slow metabolizers in their age group who drank little or no coffee.

NetCustomer on Tuesday announced customized support services for users of Oracle’s PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards enterprise applications. Down the line, it also plans to offer support services to users of applications from SAP of Walldorf, Germany, said Punita Pandey, netCustomer’s chief executive officer, in an interview Monday. Oracle last year acquired PeopleSoft, which had earlier acquired J.D. Edwards. As a result of the merger, the product roadmap has become blurred, and there is a sense of alienation in the PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards customer base.

Cognos and IBM on March 7 announced a new strategic alliance to jointly develop, market and sell service-oriented architecture products. Under the agreement, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM will increase its Cognos consulting capabilities, and Burlington, Mass.-based Cognos will optimize its business intelligence products for IBM hardware, software and services, officials for the companies said. Cognos will also market IBM’s WebSphere and information management technologies as part of the preferred reference architecture for the Cognos 8 Special Edition BI solution. Cognos and IBM will develop and market new vertical offerings to help customers deploy SOA-based products, officials said. The first verticals include the insurance and public sector markets.

An Israeli couple has been charged with corporate espionage after they were discovered engineering and distributing a Trojan horse application that is credited with several cases of data theft. The Tel Aviv District Attorney filed the 65-page indictment Sunday and announced that prosecutors had entered a plea bargain agreement with the two defendants. The couple, formerly residents of London, were extradited to Israel.

Microsoft’s chief technologist Ray Ozzie on March 7 showed off his next great big idea: a virtual clipboard to "wire-the-Web." What he proposes he calls a "Live Clipboard" for copying all the information from a Web site, then pasting it onto another site, or feeding all that data to a software program for processing. This is all significant to Microsoft, and moreover the technology industry, because Ozzie is the brains behind a new Microsoft strategy for selling software. So what he’s thinking provides great insight into how Microsoft intends to carry out its "Live" strategy. The strategy is to sell consumers and businesses Microsoft services that extend its packaged software’s capabilities, using an on-demand Web setting.