IBM has set up a global hub in Bangalore, India, for the management and creation of replicable components based on SOA (service-oriented architecture), according to a company executive. These replicable components will help increase the speed of delivery of services and lower the cost for customers who would otherwise have to buy custom-built components, said Matt Porta, head of the Global Business Solution Program of IBM’s Business Consulting Services. The Global Business Solutions Center will be in charge of enhancing IBM’s portfolio of replicable components across 17 industries. IBM, based in Armonk, New York, already has about 50 such components across those industries. The company plans to invest US$200 million a year to develop and market replicable components.

Senforce Technologies has launched enforce iNAC (intelligent Network Access Control). An extension of its endpoint security products, Senforce iNAC adds critical network protections that ensure all PCs are policy-compliant and threat-free before they can obtain access to the network. Senforce ESS (Endpoint Security Suite) and Senforce iNAC provide a two-prong approach. Senforce’s ESS provides policy-enforced endpoint protection for all desktop, mobile and wireless PCs. Agent-based ESS protects enterprise PCs with inward-facing endpoint integrity, advanced firewall, virtual private network enforcement, Wi-Fi connectivity control, and local data storage protection for control of small storage devices like USB thumb drives and others. Senforce iNAC ensures that endpoint devices are free from threats and in compliance with IT security policies before they are allowed on the network.

Both the Tories and Lib Dems have backed government measures to increase penalties for UK computer hackers. Anyone hacking a computer could be punished with 10 years’ imprisonment under new laws. There will be a clearer outlawing of offences like denial-of-service attacks in which systems are debilitated. The bill – which was being debated for the first time in the House of Commons on Monday – would also boost the penalty for using hacking tools.

What happens when a new exec sends 15,000 emails to "All Domino users" in the company? He gets to meet a lot of new people. In this fun story by Nancy Hand, we learn the admin’s side of the story.

Read this DominoPower article.

Don Haderle, the man known as the "father of DB2," has signed on to be the first member of a technical advisory board being set up by ANTs Software. ANTs markets a super-fast SQL database management system, the ANTs Data Server. Its first member, Haderle, joined IBM in 1968 as a software developer and rose to lead the technical team that created IBM’s DB2 database. Developed through supercomputing techniques where locking is avoided, ANTs Data Server allows tremendous concurrency and the ability to process transactions in parallel in situations that have a lot of users trying to get at the database, creating a lot of contention.

Six Apart announced two new business-oriented blogging products on March 7, which the company said are meant to capitalize on the growing blogging trend among small and midsize businesses and large corporations. TypePad Business Class is a hosted service aimed primarily at companies with high-traffic Web sites using blogs to communicate to their audiences. Movable Type Enterprise, a server-based blogging tool meant for large-scale internal deployments, was released in Japan and is currently in beta tests with several U.S. companies. There was no immediate date scheduled for a U.S. release candidate version.

The Software Freedom Law Center on March 8 will publish a white paper that dismisses recent publications that have alleged GNU General Public License violations in relation to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The three-page white paper, titled "Sarbanes-Oxley and the GPL: No Special Risk," essentially counsels users of the free software license that they have no need to worry. That white paper follows those from the legal department at embedded systems seller Wasabi Systems. Wasabi Systems has created a Web site that contains a licensing guide that includes a section on how the Sarbanes-Oxley Act "has changed the open source landscape by making GPL violations a federal crime."

Gaining root access to a Mac is "easy pickings," according to an individual who won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability. The hacker who won the challenge, who asked ZDNet Australia to identify him only as "Gwerdna," said he gained root control of the Mac in less than 30 minutes. According to Gwerdna, the hacked Mac could have been better protected, but it would not have stopped him because he exploited a vulnerability that has not yet been made public or patched by Apple Computer.

Cybercriminals are stepping up smaller, more targeted attacks as they seek to avoid detection and reap bigger profits by stealing personal and financial information, according to a report issued Monday. Symantec’s Internet Security Threat report said during the second half of 2005 attackers continued to move away from broad attacks seeking to breach firewalls and routers and are now taking aim at the desktop and Web applications.

Microsoft is accusing some competitors of exactly the same thing of which they have criticized the software company: pushing an exclusive standard to the detriment of all others and not enabling choice. These sharp words from Microsoft follow the formation last week of the OpenDocument Format Alliance, a coalition of more than 35 organizations from across the world whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents. The alliance–whose supporters include many of Microsoft’s Linux and open-source foes such as Corel, IBM, Novell, OpenOffice.org, Opera Software, Oracle, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems–is essentially positioning the XML-based ODF (OpenDocument Format) as the alternative to other document formats like Microsoft’s OpenXML, which is the new file format that will be used in Office 2007 when it ships later this year.