Spam is a booming business and according to a recent poll almost 30% of you are the problem. The Internet security firm Marshal recently released a study that says that 29.1% of Internet users make purchases as a result of email spam.

Compounding the problem is that most spam customers have made two or more purchases, suggesting that some people are forming buying habits. The most common items purchased were sexual enhancement pills, software, adult material and luxury items such as watches, jewelery and clothing; most of which is either pirated material or brand name knock-offs.

Despite CanSpam laws and improved email filters, spam is still a popular way for shady front men to sell their wares and for people like the notorious spam King Eddie Davidson to cash in.

What an amazing week this has been for DominoPower and the Lotus community. This week, we got to see the full power and majesty, emotion and intensity, love, anger, and passion of our extended family — all brought together to discuss an issue of deep concern to us all — the future of our shared profession.

Read this DominoPower article.

Intel revealed the Intel Atom 330, a dual-core version of its Atom ("Diamondville") processor for low-cost "nettop" PCs.

Like the Intel Atom 230, the Intel Atom 330 uses 45nm technology, features a 533MHz frontside bus and is designed to work with Intel’s 945GC chipset (the 82945GC northbridge and 82801GB southbridge). Unlike the Intel Atom 230, however, the Intel Atom 330 features dual cores, plus second-level cache that has been doubled from 512MB to 1GB.

The Atom 330 will ship initially in a low-cost D945GCLF2 mini-ITX board that has gigabit Ethernet, S-video, six-channel audio, eight USB ports and PCI expansion.

For several years now, security researchers have warned enterprises and government organizations of the growing threat posed by organized cyber criminals. Online crime rings are fleecing organizations out of customer and employee personally identifiable information, stealing passwords, intellectual property and more.

Opera Software has shipped a new version of its flagship Web browser with fixes for at least seven documented security problems but details on one vulnerability–a cross-site scripting issue reported by Chris Weber–is being kept under wraps. Opera warned that one of the seven flaws is rated "extremely severe" because of the risk of arbitrary code execution.

Credit card giant Visa is teaming up with with eight North American banks to deliver fraud alerts in real-time via SMS (text messages) and emails to cell phones.

The pilot program will allow about 2,000 Visa cardholders to set thresholds that will trigger an immediate transaction alert to a mobile device. Once an alert is received, a cardholders can verify the transaction details, and if the transaction appears to be irregular, can immediately contact their bank to help stop further transactions on the card.

In a sign that political instability and natural disasters can fuel technology spending, IBM plans to invest $300 million building new centers that can store companies’ sensitive data and deliver it remotely in the event of a meltdown. Called "cloud computing," the technology that IBM is employing in 13 new facilities lets companies access backups of their critical computer files over secured Internet connections–instead of housing all the data internally.

Many companies are pursuing cloud computing strategies. But IBM says its expanding initiative is drawing attention from customers especially concerned about severe weather and global instability, including the war between Russia and Georgia, said Michael Riegel, vice president of IBM’s Business Continuity and Resiliency Services unit.

IBM Business Partner and RIM Alliance Partner Logic Springs Technologies has announced the release of a task management system aimed at overhauling the current approach to managing everyday tasks and ongoing projects. The solution, called DC Task Management, promises to work for teams every step of the way, from the brainstorming stage through completion and review of the project.

Logic Springs Technologies, provider of groupware whose solutions include group calendaring, time off, and mobile group calendaring via BlackBerry devices, has recently expanded its scope to include a solution for organizations in need of a team-oriented task management system. Product Manager David Engasser explains that the uniqueness of the DC Task Management solution is that it is not geared specifically toward managing individuals’ personal tasks. It instead provides teams with a user-friendly method to eliminate any confusion or ambiguity that might arise in the life of a project. The four phases of the solution–"Brainstorm," "Plan," "Do," and "Review"–have been designed to accommodate multiple team members working on a project from start to finish, teams in need of a solution that allows for the development of an idea at each stage in its life.

When IBM bought Israeli storage startup XIV in January for a reported $300 million it all looked promising. But six months later, something’s amiss. XIV came out last week with a hardware announcement buried in the IBM Web site about its first products under the Big Blue banner, but IBM corporate is strangely quiet about it. It made a simple announcement for the European market only. In other words, it’s not pinging its PR agencies, breathlessly trying to get the news out.

Why not? The reason, some industry insiders–including Storage Anarchist blogger (and, please note, EMC storage strategist) Barry Burke, longtime storage analyst Arun Taneja, and Omneon veep Geoff Stedman–are saying, is that XIV didn’t deliver the goods. It doesn’t have anything that sets itself apart from others in the marketplace. In other words, it is apparent by the parent company’s lack of ballyhoo that its products simply aren’t good enough to supplant products IBM already has on hand. Or, they’re just not good enough, period.

HR departments and executives throw the word "retention" around a lot, but in theory at least, it’s a good thing for everyone involved, especially you. Workplaces want to find the magic blend of perks and incentives that will keep you from hopping over to the competition; they want to keep you happy.

But mostly they want to do these thing because employee turnover is costly and, in the words of a new report on the topic, "it is generally less expensive to retain good employees than find new ones" thus slowing the pace of employee departures is the best strategy to reduce personnel costs.