The group controlling Internet domain names may soon decide whether to relax naming rules and potentially open up a virtual domain name gold rush. At a meeting in Paris Thursday, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will vote on two key proposals.

The first would allow domains that do not use Latin characters, meaning domain names using Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic letters. The other proposal would allow domains to use nearly any letter or number combination, up to 64 characters. If ICANN approves the proposals, the world of .com and .org and country names like .jp or .fr would be opened to a much wider choice, such as .hotel or .sex.

Symantec has bundled a management software package that combines the Big Three requirements of data center management into one product: systems management, endpoint security and backup/recovery.

Using in a single management console, Symantec said June 23 that it has packaged Altiris Client Management Suite 6, Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 Desktop Edition into a new product called Endpoint Management Suite 1.0. The suite also includes the Altiris platform and configuration management database.

It’s a surprise to very few who follow the malware economy closely, but new metrics have arrived that chart the continued proliferation of the malware epidemic.

It was hard not to shake your head when anti-virus vendor Symantec reported this spring that it had recorded 711,912 unique threats during the course of 2007, a 468 percent increase compared with 2006, in its twice-yearly Internet Security Threat Report.

However, according to researchers at F-Secure, the problem continues to spiral out of control as trends such as server-side polymorphism and widely available exploit authoring tool kits continue to allow malware writers to create reams of new attacks (or, more precisely, attack variants) at a faster pace than ever before.

The Stopbadware.org initiative released a report entitled "May 2008 Badware Websites Report" summarizing the findings out of analyzing over 200,000 sites spreading malware. With recent data for malicious sites provided by Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic, Stopbadware.org also received responses from affected parties such as Google itself, The Planet, SoftLayer and iEurop. Find more details here on the methodology used, and who’s who in hosting the most badware sites for May, 2008.

Google was named in a trade secrets lawsuit alleging that the company’s business software unit copied a tiny start-up’s tool for moving customers off of Microsoft software onto Google’s.

LimitNone filed a complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google at first began promoting the smaller firm’s tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, then copied the idea and went into competition with it.

The lawsuit was brought by the commercial litigation firm of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP–by the same team who previously faced off with Google in a trademark case involving the Silicon Valley company’s highly successful online advertising system.

If you’re daydreaming about being a freelance IT consultant, read this list of 10 personality traits that Chip Camden says you should possess in order to be effective.

Adobe has shipped a critical update to patch a code execution vulnerability affecting multiple versions of its Reader and Acrobat products.

According to Adobe’s advisory, the flaw "could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system."

IBM Senior Vice President and Software Group General Manager Steve Mills met with three of his top lieutenants in his office back in 1997 to discuss the "Webification" of IBM’s enterprise tools. Out of that discussion the IBM WebSphere Application Server was born.

In an interview at IBM headquarters, Mills told eWEEK how he and Danny Sabbah, John Swainson and Alfred Spector met in Mills’ office in Somers, N.Y., to discuss IBM’s future in the nascent application server space when the market competition was growing hot and heavy. Only Sabbah remains at IBM of the three lieutenants. Sabbah, who was Mills’ CTO at the time, is now general manager of IBM’s Rational business unit. Swainson is CEO of CA, and Spector is vice president of research and special initiatives at Google.

Choosing whether or not to go with a remote database administrator to complement or fulfill your data management needs requires careful contemplation.

The market for remote database administration is fairly crowded. However, the service does not make sense for every business, and contrary to what is sure to be many people’s first thought, having a remote DBA versus an on-site DBA, is not always an either-or type of situation. For some organizations, it may make sense for a remote DBA to serve as an adjunct to an internal DBA.

Ask any senior executive why IT fails to deliver value and the honest ones will soon use words like "unresponsive" and "incompetent," while the more politically correct will usually emit platitudes about hiring problems, systems complexity, media driven expectations, and communications barriers–all of which have IT’s unwillingness or inability to respond promptly to user needs at their root.