Rampant in the tech industry, most workers have no choice but to sign non-compete agreements–but are they even worth getting worked up over? The experts say no.

A technology professional working at a large company was recently asked to sign a noncompete contract and confidentiality agreement that gave the company a royalty-free license to any "invention" he created while working there and up to six months after leaving the company. The employee, who declined to offer his name or the company in question, was worried about signing his creative freedom and future competitiveness away and called out to the Slashdot community for advice.

Responses ranged from a sarcastic "good luck fighting it" to "don’t worry, it’s not enforceable" and, from the employee himself, "obviously, it’s time for a new job," each underscoring the hazy area noncompete clauses occupy in modern workplaces. Employees hate them, employers consider them necessary, and although they are almost never brought to court–and even when they are, are rarely enforceable–they strike enough fear in the heart of workers that many would rather stay put than risk being sued for violation of the contract’s term, say employment lawyers.

The worst-case scenario used to be that online ads are pesky, memory-draining distractions. But a new batch of banner ads is much more sinister: They hijack personal computers and bully users until they agree to buy antivirus software. And the ads do their dirty work even if you don’t click on them.

The malware-spiked ads have been spotted on various legitimate websites, ranging from the British magazine The Economist to baseball’s MLB.com to the Canada.com news portal. Hackers are using deceptive practices and tricky Flash programming to get their ads onto legitimate sites by way of DoubleClick’s DART program. Web publishers use the DoubleClick-hosted platform to manage advertising inventory.

Google has added another weapon to its arsenal to help programmers move data from the productivity applications of Microsoft and others. Launched Nov. 15, the Google Apps Email Migration API is an application programming interface that lets software developers create tools that can move email from any data source to Google Apps’ Premier, Education or Partner editions.

The new software opens up email migration to the broadest range of possibilities and builds on an email migration tool Google launched June 25 that lets administrators move email from their IMAP mail systems to Google Apps.

Teamstudio, provider of software solutions that address IT Governance requirements for Lotus Notes, announces the release of Teamstudio Edition 24 with support for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Version 8. Additional features of this suite of development tools include advanced branching and merging technology that saves IT organizations time, reduces risk and increases efficiency when developing and managing Lotus Notes applications.

U.S. wireless carrier AT&T has released AT&T Remote Monitor, a new facilities monitoring solution to help small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) keep tabs on their various offices or work sites via smartphones or Internet connected PCs.

The Remote Monitor product employs Internet Protocol video cameras and various environmental sensors to let SMB owners keep a constant eye on their premises. And it can send customizable alerts when motion is detected or temperatures fluctuate within their organizations’ facilities–all using Java-enabled AT&T mobile devices or computers with broadband Internet connections.

Hackers will use Web 2.0 technologies to make their attacks sneakier and more effective, according to a security researcher. Google Mashups, RSS feeds and search can all be misused to distribute malware, attack people and communicate with botnets, said Petko Petkov, speaking at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) US 2007 conference, held on eBay’s campus.

Hacker toolkits like MPack have made it easier for the bad guys to deploy malicious code, but some of these emerging technologies promise to take hacking to a whole new level, he said.

Championed for breaking down application silos, service-oriented architecture can also bridge two IT islands, business processes and telecommunications. IBM and Nortel Networks are unveiling joint SOA technology that links business processes, such as scheduling and project management, with the latest in telecommunications including mobile phones.

Moore’s Law, the evolution of Web 2.0 applications and virtualization are among the trends influencing the network security industry, according to unified threat management vendor Fortinet Inc.

Fortinet’s chief marketing officer, former Gartner analyst Richard Stiennon, spoke to Network World Canada about the seven major trends affecting the direction of the industry.

IBM unveiled plans for "BlueCloud," a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.

Blue Cloud, built on IBM’s expertise in leading massive-scale computing initiatives, will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services. IBM announced today that its Blue Cloud development is supported by more than 200 IBM Internet-scale researchers worldwide and targets clients who want to explore the extreme scale of cloud computing infrastructures quickly and easily.

Under Notes 5.x it was easy to enter a fake name into a Profile document; you simply typed in something and saved it. The client complained, but it still accepted non-hierarchical names like "Annalee’s Astounding Addenda" or "Expense Reporting Dept". But, in Notes 6.x and 7.x, you can’t type in the field. You have to select a name from an address book. Nancy Hand discusses how to get around this limitation.

Read this DominoPower article.