The University of Toronto and IBM are building Canada’s most powerful supercomputer, a mammoth machine that will need its own building for storage and will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second.

It’s expected the system will be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world and the largest outside the United States. It will be able to store data equivalent to that held by one million regular DVDs.

A Briton accused of hacking into secret military computers has won a two-week stay on his extradition to the US.

Glasgow-born Gary McKinnon won a stay until 28 August at the European Court of Human Rights after losing an appeal at the House of Lords last month.

The unemployed man could face life in jail if convicted of accessing 97 US military and Nasa computers.

Google isn’t supposed to go down. Yet Google Gmail and Google Apps went down for 15 hours Aug. 6 and 7. And on Aug. 11, Gmail went down for 2 hours. Users made their discontent known in discussion boards and blogs, raising the broader question: if they can’t rely on Google as their Web platform, who can they rely on?

Foundry Networks, a performance and total solutions provider for end-to-end routing and switching, announced out-of-the-box integration with IBM Tivoli Netcool software for customers using Foundry switching and routing products. This integration facilitates simplified operations for Foundry customers using IBM Tivoli Netcool, thereby helping improve business efficiency. This technology partnership allows Tivoli Netcool software to effectively manage Foundry switches and routers in networks, element/network management systems and applications.

In the end, it was hackers at DefCon that got hacked. After three days of software cracking duels and hacking seminars, self-described computer ninjas at the infamous gathering in Las Vegas found out Sunday that their online activities were hijacked without them catching on.

A standing-room crowd cheered admiringly as Tony Kapela and Alex Pilosov showed them how they were "pwned" by a simple technique that could be used to "steal the Internet."

XML is a communication format for exchanging structured documents and data. Too often, an XML format is chosen arbitrarily and on the fly during development, without much planning or design. Design the right XML format up front, and you can meet the needs of everyone involved in the communication. If you don’t, you’re in for a long journey of format revisions. Learn how to design a format less likely to require change and agile enough to incorporate new requirements with the simple addition of new extensions instead of full changes.

Scammers using the Net to hype stocks are being targeted with software that can spot fraudulent trading patterns. Many hi-tech conmen use junk mail to hype stocks so they can sell shares they own in the companies at a profit. It has been estimated that 15% of all spam or junk email is made up of messages that "pump" stocks that are later "dumped."

Developed by VeriSign, the anti-fraud software works by keeping an eye on real-time trading activity. Verisign’s software is a module that brokers can add to their in-house trading system that alerts anti-fraud teams to look more closely at trades that exhibit certain behaviour patterns.

IBM has unveiled a sneak peek of its new Lotus iNotes, a Web app client for its Lotus Domino messaging server to bring email, calendar, and contacts to iPhone. The move fulfills rumors of customized iPhone support for Lotus Notes and demonstrates IBM’s evolving interest in Apple within the enterprise.

Planned for delivery later this year, Lotus iNotes is built upon IBM’s existing Lotus Domino Web Access infrastructure. The company’s Web site invites users to "bring the enterprise to your Apple iPhone" and says the software will deliver a "rich Apple iPhone user experience."

The best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords–and replace them with other random strings every couple of months. Then there’s the rest of us, selecting the short, the familiar and the easiest to remember; and holding onto it forever.

Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep us safe from identity theft, no matter how clever we are in choosing them. That would be the case even if we had done a better job of listening to instructions. Surveys show that we’ve remained stubbornly fond of perennial favorites like "password," "123456" and "LetMeIn." The underlying problem, however, isn’t their simplicity; it’s the log-on procedure itself.

The shakiness of the macroeconomy plus general problems with travel arrangements caused many usual attendees to sit out this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. More than 7,500 people signed up, but about half that actually showed up, some estimates said. But there was no lack of enthusiasm for new product releases–especially in the data center, mobile and cloud computing sectors. Those who stayed home missed a lot of good new products and plenty of good networking opportunities.