Hewlett-Packard settled cases with The New York Times Company and three BusinessWeek journalists Wednesday after being caught spying on reporters in 2006.

The parties did not disclose the size of the settlements. HP has already paid US$4.5 million in a civil-case settlement with the State of California related to the incident.

Registration is now open for the second annual IBM IMPACT event. As the one of the industry’s largest SOA gatherings, IMPACT will bring together more than 6,000 customers and partners from around the world. At this year’s event, IBM will be making significant news announcements around the business and IT aspects of SOA.

With more than 100 customers telling their SOA journey at IMPACT, this event will be the most valuable and efficient way to hear first hand how IBM is mapping its SOA strategy to the company’s larger business goals.

Last week, we talked about the Lotusphere announcements about the currently shipping Notes and Domino. This week, it’s time to look at the new Mashups, Portal, Symphony, Sametime, and more, more, more.

Read this DominoPower article.

A lawsuit filed last week over warrantless searches of laptops and other electronic devices at U.S. borders highlights an issue that all travelers, U.S. citizens and others, need to be aware of when entering the country, according to the executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

The suit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Asian Law Caucus, two California-based civil rights groups. It asks the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to disclose information on its policies for inspecting the contents of laptops and other electronic devices at the country’s ports of entry.

The lawsuit was prompted by what the two groups contended were the growing number of reports they were receiving from travelers who claimed to have been subjected to such searches. In most instances, the searches were conducted without apparent reason and with no details offered on what information might have been viewed or downloaded by customs officials, the suit alleged.

Students at North Carolina State University are learning to build business applications in the Web 2.0 mold using an IBM incubator project called Project Zero.

Announced last year, Project Zero is a programming framework for rapidly building Web applications. Its pieces include a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP (hypertext preprocessor), two hot dynamic languages, along with APIs (application programming interfaces) for creating REST (representational state transfer) Web services, user interfaces and mashups, according to IBM. It is available as a plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment, as well as in a version for developers who prefer to work from the command line.

Virtualization in the data center has broken out of the experimental and testing stage in many IT shops, but there are still a great many large-enterprise CIOs who are not completely sold on using it in daily production.

New research reported Feb. 12 that worldwide, 54 percent of large enterprises rate management of their virtual server environment as a critical or high IT priority. Yet only 45 percent think their companies are doing an effective job in this area.

Labor protests in the high-tech industry are rare, but IBM is in the midst of one–and it’s unfolding entirely online. Instead of waving protest signs outside the company gates, affected workers are airing, in comments accompanying an online petition, disappointment, anger and bitterness with the company over a salary cut affecting six percent of IBM’s U.S. workforce.

That networked multifunction printer sitting innocently in the corner of your office just might be the most significant entry point for hackers to hijack sensitive data from your business.

Even worse, security researchers warn, they are a forgotten risk in every enterprise, featuring hardware that combines several functions in a single unit–fax, copier, printer and scanner.

This article discusses the Personal Wizards plug-in in IBM Lotus Expeditor. You can use a Personal Wizards model as an automation tool, as interactive documentation, as a tutorial or guided walkthrough, or as a debugging instrument for Lotus Expeditor applications.

The number of malware code samples in the wild grew 30 percent to 410,000 in 2007, according to security researchers at IBM’s ISS division. The Storm worm in particular accounted for 13 percent of the entire malware collection. IBM released these findings and more in its security trends report for 2007, which summarizes the threat landscape based on IBM’s research on malware, software vulnerabilities, phishing, and Web sites with questionable content.