Most information technology workers saw little growth in their salary levels during 2005, and many of the professionals shouldn’t expect to see significant pay increases any time soon, according to the latest industry wage survey published by researchers Monday. In the preliminary results of its January 2006 IT Salary Survey, research firm Janco Associates said that the mean compensation for computer industry professionals remained relatively flat over the final quarter of 2005, as it has since the beginning of calendar 2004, marking eight straight quarters of level performance.

Security and law enforcement professionals are appalled that their personal information was leaked by Guidance Software, a security software and training company they say should have known better than to leave an unencrypted database exposed on the Internet. Guidance last month sent a letter to its customers advising them that on Dec. 7 it discovered a security breach on its customer records database. This wasn’t your typical breach–this was a crime Guidance customers described as being of national security proportions. The database contained credit card numbers of some 3,800 people, including investigative professionals from the National Security Agency, FBI and CIA, as well as heads of law enforcement worldwide.

The first draft of GNU General Public License Version 3 will be unveiled next week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., but that milestone is likely to be more of a beginning than an ending. The release of the draft will kick off months of debate over the content and exact wording of the license that will govern much open-source software for the foreseeable future. This is the first time in 15 years that the GPL, which governs many open-source projects, including the Linux kernel, has been updated to reflect the current IT environment.

Malguard Services is collaborating on a book publishing deal to create the definitive book on hacking. As part of the book, Malguard Services wants to illustrate the best of the best in the hacking world… the best hackers, the most elite hacks, and the state of the true hacker underground. The main audience will be IT Security professionals, but the book should appeal to senior management, non-technical, and non-security professionals as well. So far, no one has been successful in hacking Malguard Services’ Hacme Contest machine.

After three years of accusations, SCO Group has finally begun aiming a legal charge of copyright infringement toward a Linux supplier. The claim is in an amendment SCO proposes to make to its lawsuit against Novell, whose sales of Linux, SCO argues, violate SCO’s purported Unix copyrights. SCO filed its request to add the claim on Dec. 30, nearly two years after it first filed its suit against Novell.

The Apache Software Foundation released Apache Geronimo 1.0, an open-source Java application server, which has been under development for two and a half years. The release of Geronimo creates another freely available open-source alternative to closed-source Java application servers, a product category which many industry executives contend should be a low-cost commodity.

Critics have taken aim at a study published by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team that said more vulnerabilities were found in Linux/Unix than in Windows last year. The report, Cyber Security Bulletin 2005, was released last week. It claimed that out of 5,198 reported flaws, 812 were found in Microsoft’s Windows operating system, 2,328 were found in open-source Unix/Linux systems. The rest were declared to be multiple operating system vulnerabilities. The report has attracted criticism from some in the open-source community. Linux vendor Red Hat said the vulnerabilities had been wrongly tagged, and so could not be used to compare the relative security of Windows and Linux/Unix platforms.

Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, outlined plans to bring a wide range of content, from sports to first-run movies, to anyone with a broadband Internet connection and a remote control using its new Viiv PC platform. While it incorporates new hardware and software, including Intel’s latest Core Duo and Pentium D 900 series chips, Viiv represents the company’s larger effort to bring together a variety of content and display it on a range of devices, including televisions and handhelds. The new platform will spawn several different types of desktop PCs and let users seamlessly access and share music, movies, television, and other media.

IBM announced major changes in its retirement plan, freezing its pension fund and shifting employees instead to an expanded 401(k), in a move the company said would save it billions of dollars in coming years. IBM will stop contributing to its pension fund on Dec. 31, 2007, the company said. Employee benefits from that defined benefit plan will remain fixed, instead of growing each year. At that point, it will begin a new 401(k) defined contribution plan, into which it will pay as much as 10 percent of an employee’s annual salary.

Is Domino Domain Monitoring really all that and a bag of chips? Philippe Schlier, CTO of GSX Groupware Solutions agrees that DDM does have its uses, but he’s also not convinced all that’s claimed to be new is really and truly new. In this penetrating analysis, Philippe looks closely at DDM and looks carefully at the DDM’s marketing claims.

Read this DominoPower article.