The city-state of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, has kicked off an effort to land some of the outsourcing work that is heading to countries with low labor costs like India and China. But instead of trying to compete head-to-head against those giants, the country is positioning itself as a place where companies can place their more senior or more qualified employees who may not want to live in Bangalore or Mumbai. The DOZ (Dubai Outsource Zone), the government agency/free trade zone responsible for the project, recently signed a memorandum of understanding with a large Indian outsourcing company to bring work here, said Ismail Al Naqi, the director of DOZ.

The Liberty Alliance has given the latest batch of identity and authentication products–from vendors IBM, NEC, NTT, and RSA Security–a passing grade on its stringent interoperability tests. At a five-day testing event in Tokyo, the products proved that they conform to interoperability standards for Liberty Identity Federation, alliance specifications that enable open federated identity.

The FBI said emails made to look like they come from the agency are warning computer users that the FBI is monitoring their Internet use. "These scam emails tell the recipients that their Internet use has been monitored by the FBI and that they have accessed illegal Web sites," the FBI said in a statement. "The emails then direct recipients to open an attachment and answer questions." The agency said it was investigating the matter and urged anyone who received such an email to report it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

We’re still digging into Microsoft/Ozzie’s announcement of RSS+SSE, but this is something worthy of consideration. RSS is an XML-based syndication protocol which has been widely adopted.

In fact, here at DominoPower, we’ve had RSS feeds (the old, 0.91 variant) since 1998 and were one of the first publications to offer them. We’re currently revamping all our systems to support comprehensive and deep RSS 2.0 feeds throughout the publications.

What makes RSS+SSE interesting is that it’s a protocol, promoted by Microsoft, that attempts to accomplish what you might consider lightweight replication in an XML protocol. This means, for example, if you want to keep contacts synchronized, there’s now a very simple-to-implement XML-based protocol for making that happen.

If you’re using Notes or Domino, have any interest in RSS or XML, you should definitely give the spec a complete read.

From Ray Ozzie, creator of Notes and current Microsoft employee, comes a new format for information sharing and publication that goes beyond RSS (Really Simple Sharing). In his personal Web log, Ozzie outlines the details of SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), an RSS extension that quite frankly goes beyond the understanding of this writer, but if you know anything about RSS, I’m sure you’ll understand the significance of this new project.

LiveTime Software, provider of J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) based service management software, announced the availability of the LiveTime Appliance, the industry’s first service management appliance. Designed exclusively for 64 bit operation, the appliance has been specifically optimized for high concurrent access, fault tolerance and security and is based upon the Solaris 10 Operating System from Sun Microsystems. Designed for organizations that want a highly tuned, pre-configured, hardened service and support solution with no maintenance, the system is completely plug and play and can be installed within a matter of minutes. Complete with Active Directory, LDAP and asset management server integration, the LiveTime Appliance fits seamlessly into any enterprise environment. As a completely vendor neutral solution, customers can utilize the built-in MySQL or PostgreSQL RDBMS, or alternatively connect to any third party database such as Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase and many others.

ChatGuard is the first software program that monitors and takes control of chat sessions accessed by online sexual predators. Monitoring is done by recognizing words and phrases specific to online predators. Once detected, the chat is dropped, the session is logged, and the user name of the solicitor is blocked from any future contact with any and all computers running ChatGuard software.

A laptop computer containing names, social security numbers, and other sensitive information of 161,000 current and former employees of Boeing was stolen recently, the U.S. aerospace manufacturer said Friday. Some of the employee information on the laptop included banking information and birth dates, Boeing said, adding that there was no evidence any of the information was misused. The laptop was not stolen from a Boeing site, the company said. They did not say where the theft took place.

IT administrators who are inclined to dismiss the dust storm that has blown up over Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s digital rights management rootkit might want to reconsider. Vulnerabilities in Web and client/server applications are becoming the new battleground in the war against malicious hackers, as holes in network perimeters and Web servers become harder to find and exploit. That’s the good news, but shoring up applications against security vulnerabilities will be harder than plugging holes in Web servers or network firewalls, security experts agree.

In an effort to join the move toward virtualization, IBM is building a software tool to enable customers to change data sources or rules that govern data without affecting applications. Due for release in the first quarter of next year, the product, currently known as Information Virtualization Server, will be part of IBM’s Information Management portfolio and will plug into the company’s upgraded DB2 platform, code-named Viper.