Earlier this week, Salesforce.com migrated a subset of its overall user base to its Spring ’08 release. In the process, Salesforce.com experienced an outage to its NA5 server Feb. 11 that lasted, intermittently, for about 7 hours and affected a small set of customers.

On the same day, BlackBerry users found only a black hole lasting for several hours when they tried to reach email and calendar services. While it’s not clear exactly what caused either outage, the bottom line is that on-demand services, like the phone company, are subject to some unexpected downtime.

Are intermittent system outages the end of the world? No, for most users (though it may seem like it at the time). But small outages may well be the new norm for users of on-demand services, at least for the time being.

Getting around the defense mechanisms that malware writers erect isn’t easy. From packers to run-time obfuscators, software-armoring techniques create problems for reverse engineers and security analysts.

Security pros Danny Quist and Val Smith, of Offensive Computing, have a solution–Saffron, a stealthy debugging platform they are developing. Having first presented the tool at the 2007 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, the two demonstrated an updated version Feb. 17 at ShmooCon 4 in Washington, D.C.

The pair was able to successfully defeat two well-known packers, TeLock and Vmprotect, as well as a custom packer presented to them afterward by two members of the audience.

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The teams developing the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) standards should work together, evolving the two in parallel, the editor of the ODF standard said Tuesday in an open letter to the standards-setting community.

The Microsoft-sponsored OOXML document format is just days away from a critical meeting that will influence whether the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will adopt it as a standard, as its rival ODF was adopted in May 2006. Relations between supporters of the two formats are, for the most part, combative rather than cordial.

Will the building block of life become the building block of the semiconductor industry? It’s possible.

Scientists at IBM are conducting research into arranging carbon nanotubes–strands of carbon atoms that can conduct electricity–into arrays with DNA molecules. Once the nanotube array is meticulously constructed, the laboratory-generated DNA molecules could be removed, leaving an orderly grid of nanotubes. The nanotube grid, conceivably, could function as a data storage device or perform calculations.

A flaw in the way the Firefox and Opera browsers handle an image file could allow an attacker to see what Web sites a person has visited.

The problem concerns how the two browsers handle a ".BMP," or bitmap, image file, according to an advisory written by Gynvael Coldwind of Vexillium.org, who posted a video illustrating the problem.

On Monday, one of Harvard University’s Web sites appeared to have been hacked, with its contents appearing on the BitTorrent file-sharing network.

A compressed 125MB file claiming to be the database for the Web site of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is available via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer to peer) network. The file is listed on The Pirate Bay, a Web site that indexes torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content from other users on BitTorrent.

A recent IDC study projected a sixfold growth in worldwide information between 2006 and 2010, from 161 exabytes in 2006 to more than 988 exabytes in 2010. All of this data requires storage, and enterprises are struggling to find ways to keep their data organized, well-managed and easily retrievable.

It’s never easy to come up with a definitive list of IT professionals with the most influence on the way we secure desktops, networks and mobile devices. And limiting the list to 15 hackers is a near-impossible task, but, in Ryan Naraine’s mind, these are the folks who stand out today as stirring the imagination and forcing us to rethink our approach to security in an always-on world.

A private equity company has riden to SCO’s rescue five months after the beleaguered company applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Stephen Norris & Co and unnamed partners in the Middle East have agreed to invest up to US$100 million in cash to finance a reorganisation plan.

Under the deal, which must be approved by the US Bankruptcy Court judge in Delaware who is reviewing the company’s bankruptcy filing, SNCP would gain a controlling interest in the company and take it private.