A data breach resulting from a stolen laptop has leaked sensitive information including Social Security Numbers of approximately 62,000 (as reported by Stanford University) former and current Standford University employees. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a site devoted to the collection of data breach information, reports this number as 72,000. Stanford’s site says that original estimates placed the number at 72,000.

Every so often, an article or study comes out that strives to make IT look bad, either ineffective or a misguided use of corporate dollars. And every so often, an article or study comes out that shows some IT people making their own selves look bad. A new survey falls into this latter category.

One-third of IT workers admitted to snooping on confidential files in their company’s networks, including salary details, personal emails and meeting minutes, according to a survey released June 19.

For years now, the IT industry has been dominated by men–women deterred by the geeky image of an anti-social, geeky teenager who hasn’t seen daylight in weeks, working in the basement of his mum’s house, programming away to some complicated code. On the flip side, you have the perspective of a woman in the IT industry somewhere, where they’re sat behind a desk filing away, writing reports and performing general secretarial duties, whilst flirting with the other employees as she stirs their coffee, whilst imitating something sexually deviant with her tongue.

Both are wrong, because both are misconceptions and mistaken stereotypes. Although there may be elements of both some might actually like, it does pose the million dollar question. Why aren’t there enough women in the IT workplace?

You’ve heard the stories about a stolen or lost laptop putting the personal data of hundreds or even thousands of people at risk. You know that mobile systems are a breeding ground for worms and viruses. You know you should take precautions so that bad luck or carelessness doesn’t put the identity of others in the wrong hands–and your company’s good name in the mud. But where to start? Here are 10 reasons why your company’s laptops are at risk, and 10 ways to close the gaps.

The Associated Press claimed that it was ready to change to face the new Internet world–and that meant not just being a gatekeeper, but joining in the conversation. As noted at the time, AP execs said all that, only to immediately follow up with plans that looked like it was trying to become a new type of gatekeeper. It didn’t help that the company had also just sued VeriSign’s Moreover division for linking to AP stories along with a title and a tiny excerpt. That sort of thing is clearly fair use–but the AP doesn’t seem to think so. And now, it’s expanding its target list. Rather than just going after the big aggregators (surprisingly, Google settled), it appears that the Associated Press is going after bloggers for merely posting a linked headline and a tiny snippet of text from the article.

Department Calendar is one of the better named products we’ve seen. It’s, quite obviously, a calendar for departments. Once you think about this, you realize that this introduces a whole host of collaborative features you might not need in your basic PIM calendar. But how does it stand up to real use. In this collaborative product review, four production users share their opinions on the product.

Read this DominoPower article.

IBM has announced that Gartner once again named IBM the world’s number one vendor based on market share for application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software. The report, which analyzed the total AIM market for 2007, showed IBM increasing its marketshare and now holding 28.9 percent share of the overall market, with more than three times the market presence of its closest competitor.

The Gartner data shows that IBM grew 15.1 percent, faster than the overall market which only grew at 12.9 percent for 2007. Additionally, according to the report, IBM holds the number one marketshare position in eight submarkets.

IBM says it has flipped the switch on what it has dubbed the "greenest" datacenter in North America. The 115,000-square-foot facility is sited in Boulder and was made out of an existing office building. Approximately 65 percent of the materials from the original facility were recycled and about 25 percent of the "new" materials used in the retrofit contained recycled products. IBM snagged training incentives from the state, some investment credits from the city and some rebates from Xcel Energy for the work it did on the project.

Red Hat has issued a security update covering multiple versions of the OpenOffice open-source productivity suite to address a flaw related to use of the software with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating systems.

Rated as "highly critical" by Secunia, the heap overflow flaw in the OpenOffice memory allocator could allow an attacker to remotely compromise unpatched end-user systems, Red Hat reported.

The Linux software maker ranked the issue as "important" and said that if a specially crafted file was opened by a victim using an unpatched system, an attacker could use the flaw to crash OpenOffice applications or, possibly, execute arbitrary code. Red Hat specifically credited researcher Sean Larsson for initially discovering the problem.

Two of the four major browsers have undergone some big changes in the past two weeks. Firefox 3 is the big news of the week, pulling down eight million or so downloads in its first 24 hours in the wild. However, the Opera browser updated to its much-awaited version 9.5 last week. Both of them have game, but for different reasons, so take a look at how they match up.