A former U.S. military contractor has pleaded guilty to exceeding authorized access to a computer and aggravated identity theft after he was accused of selling names and Social Security numbers of 17,000 military employees, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Randall Craig, 41, of Houston, pleaded guilty Friday to both counts of an indictment returned in April by a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Craig acknowledged selling information contained in a military database to a person he believed to represent a foreign government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The person who purchased the names and Social Security numbers from Craig was an undercover FBI agent, they said.

Mobile Admin is an enterprise network administration platform that allows unified management of all IT systems from any computer or handheld device. The Mobile Admin server software is installed on a single server on the network and allows for instant management of all other systems, without the need to install any agent software on the systems to be managed.

There was a time when telecommuting was seen as a panacea. The proliferation of wireless technology had made it easier for workers in countless arenas to work from their living rooms or the coffee shop of their choice, leading waves of companies to embrace partial or total remote work policies for their masses.

It seemed like a win-win. Employees were happy because they weren’t wasting hours of their day snarled in traffic, it gave them a better-work life balance, they were more efficient without in-office distractions, and, in turn, they got more satisfaction from their jobs. Bosses were happy because they were saving money on office space and because happier employees were theoretically more productive and less likely to job-hop. And businesses were happy because the promise of a flexible working environment was a priceless tactic to recruit workers, young and old.

So what happened? Only a few years since it was heralded as a newer, better way to work, studies began to emerge that put chinks in the armor of telecommuting. Sixty-one percent of executives surveyed in January 2007 by Korn/Ferry International, a Los Angeles-based recruiting firm, said they saw career stagnancy among telecommuting workers.

Research In Motion announced a new BlackBerry Certification Program that will extend a reliable, comprehensive certification testing service in support of the BlackBerry wireless platform. The new BlackBerry Certification Program is intended to provide an empirical means of measuring and validating the real world skills and knowledge used in planning, administering and supporting BlackBerry product deployments. The program, which is designed for IT professionals and consultants as well as wireless carriers and other BlackBerry partners, will be available in 135 countries.

Samuel King and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown that they could gain control of a computer by adding malicious circuits to its processor. Because these circuits interfere with the computer at a deeper level than a virus, they effectively operate "below the radar" of AV software.

To evaluate the risk from such hardware, King’s team designed their own malicious circuits. They used a processor called a field programmable gate array (FPGA), whose logic circuits can be rearranged, to create a replica of an existing open source processor called Leon3, which contains around 1.7 million circuits. They then added about 1000 malicious circuits not present in Leon3.

The team found that the circuits allowed them to bypass security controls on Leon3 in a similar way to how a virus hands control of a computer to a hacker, but without requiring a flaw in a software application. When they hooked the FPGA up to another computer, they were able to steal passwords stored in its memory and install malicious software that would allow the operating system it was running to be remotely controlled.

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a working unit of a memory circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it has retained.

The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events.

For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave the heating time for different food types based on the information it has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP.[Can you say Skynet?]

More than four years after filing a lawsuit about alleged misuse of the Unix operating system, the SCO Group will get its days in court, beginning today in Salt Lake City.

The defendant will be Novell, which SCO sued in 2004. SCO also had filed a lawsuit over Unix in 2003 against International Business Machines Corp.

SCO’s lawsuit against IBM claims the company had violated an agreement by inserting Unix code into Linux, a free "open source" computer operating system distributed by IBM that competes with proprietary Unix.

Have you wanted to port your infrastructure and business line applications to a Linux desktop environment, but been deterred by the need to access critical Microsoft Windows or legacy applications? Finding a way to support these critical business line applications is crucial when considering the move to Linux. This article highlights the various tools that let you access these applications from Linux desktops.

A Colorado man accused of sending hundreds of thousands of spam emails has been sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and falsifying email headers.

Thirty-five-year-old Edward "Eddie" Davidson of Louisville was also ordered to pay nearly $715,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced Monday and ordered to report to prison authorities in May.

Learn how to operate your Lotus Quickr library content with Lotus Quickr REST services based on Dojo. In the example described in this article, content from different Lotus Quickr libraries interacts with simple Lotus Quickr REST services in the library linker tool, which is based on the latest Dojo 1.0 framework.