A researcher working at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio has found a new use for an open-source algorithm, reports New Scientist in its December 1 issue. While the software was originally used to analyze the topics people talk about, researcher Gilbert Peterson and his colleagues have found a new use: snooping through company email.

Author-Topic, developed by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, is essentially a data mining tool that chews on textual information. According to the article, Petersen has used the Author-Topic system to mine email data. By looking at what people write about and the manner in which they do so, Petersen says, the system flags them as possibly feeling alienated.

A New Zealand teenager has been questioned in connection with a scheme by hackers to remotely take over more than 1 million computers worldwide and use them for criminal activity, New Zealand police and the FBI said Thursday. The FBI has identified at least 2.5 million unsuspecting computer users who have been victims of so-called "botnet" activity. Hackers install viruses, worms and other attack programs that allow them to take over the computers and use them to commit cyber crimes.

While most bosses aren’t so naive that they believe there is a magic pill or potion that would get their employees to whistle while they work, stabs at what would make those employees happier are quite often off the mark. Ken Hess, a technical analyst at a large global outsourcing company in Tulsa, says, quite frankly, hisbosses have "no clue."

IBM is suing Web retailer Shentech for selling laptop batteries that catch fire, and allegedly are stamped with fake IBM logos. The suit, filed on 20 November in the US, accuses Shentech of trademark infringement, false advertising, unfair competition and deceptive trade practices.

IBM says that a consumer in Ohio bought a battery from Shentech for a ThinkPad laptop. The battery overheated and caught fire, causing damage to the laptop, IBM said. The user reported the problem to Lenovo, which licences the IBM trademark. After examining the faulty battery, IBM discovered that it was not a genuine IBM battery, the company said in the suit. IBM then ordered 12 batteries from Shentech and found them all to be fakes, IBM said.

Nearly three quarters of IT professionals believe people over forty can progress up the career ladder according to research carried out by online recruitment specialist Theitjobboard.com. This compares to a positive response from only half (50.3 percent) the participants in the company’s 2006 survey. The survey is part of a regular research programm undertaken by Theitjobboard.com to understand the issues behind the trends in the IT recruitment marketplace.

According to a study released on Thursday by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and information management research firm, each customer record lost or compromised in 2007 cost companies $197, compared to $182 in 2006. That represents an increase of more than 8 percent.

This is the third year that the Ponemon Institute has conducted its U.S. Cost of a Data Breach survey; the average per-incident cost has climbed each year. The increase between 2005 and 2006 was particularly steep, clocking in at over 40 percent.

Did the OpenDocument Foundation recently shutter its doors for good because it was unable to convince Oasis to support its converter, known as Da Vinci? Or was it because OpenDocument Format was simply not designed for the conversion of Microsoft Office documents, applications, and processes? The debate on these issues continues two weeks after foundation members confirmed the organization had shut down.

Marino Marcich, the managing director of the ODF Alliance, an advocacy group of vendors, academic groups and technical organizations, told eWEEK that the Foundation had proposed advances to Da Vinci, its plug-in for providing interoperability between Microsoft’s binary formats and ODF, in the Oasis OpenDocument Technical Committee. Oasis, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is the body that "owns" the Open Document Format specification.

When designing applications, consider carefully whether the value you are keeping really is a number that you will use in arithmetic calculations, or whether it is just a text string that contains numeric characters. You won’t regret those few extra moments in your application design process when you see the extra robustness of the application and its greater resilience to change. In this helpful article, Senior Technical Editor Mick Moignard helps you understand where you could go wrong, even if you do it by the numbers.

Read this DominoPower article.

A researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in IBM Lotus Notes, which could be exploited by attackers remotely to cause a buffer overflow and gain access to a victim’s machine.

The flaw is in the way the Lotus 1-2-3 email client processes a .123 file with its file viewer. An attacker can exploit the flaw to crash the application or trick a user into double clicking and viewing a specially crafted attachment, according to an advisory issued Tuesday by the French Security Incident Response Team(FrSIRT). Lotus Notes version 7.x is affected and possibly versions 8.x and 6.5.6 as well as other software packages using Verity KeyView SDK.

Tens of thousands of malware-serving pages, crafted to reach a high search engine ranking, are showing up in the first page of returns from Google, Yahoo and Live. The seeding of malware into pages returned from searches for innocent terms has reached epic proportions, security researchers say.

Malicious iFrames, rootkits and fake codecs are being served up on tens of thousands of sites returned as results for searches for such things as alternate router firmware or "how to for Microsoft Excel."