IBM is challenging Microsoft with a game of "anything you can do I can do." Its new Lotus Symphony office suite–now available as a public beta–does much of what the $400 Standard edition of Microsoft Office does, only at a much better price: It’s free.

Comprised of three applications–a word processor (Lotus Symphony Documents), a spreadsheet (Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets), and a presentation creator (Lotus Symphony Presentations)–Symphony supports both Windows (XP, Vista, 2000) and Linux operating systems. (IBM says a version for the Mac OS is coming, but it hasn’t said when.) Each app can open and save in a variety of file formats, including Office (2003/XP/97; not 2007) and ODF (Open Document Format), as well as save files as PDFs. It requires a minimum of 540MB of hard disk space on Windows (750MB on Linux) and 512MB of RAM.

Employees toiling under an abusive supervisor often rebel quietly and indirectly by slacking off on the job and handing in sloppy work.

Researchers at Florida State University surveyed more than 180 employees from a wide variety of professions, asking whether they had endured a history of abuse from their bosses, then asking a slew of workplace performance questions.

IBM has unveiled Information Management System (IMS) 10, a new hierarchical database management and transaction system that delivers enhanced XML and Web services capabilities, making easier for customers to better use information as a strategic asset by evolving existing business critical applications to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).

A U.S.-based information security think tank has released a report detailing what it predicts will be the top five cyber threats in 2008.

The Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), a group of Georgia Tech faculty members from its College of Computing, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, among other university entities, is a National Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education dedicated to researching and spreading the word about new and upcoming cyber threats. GTISC predicts that the following five cyber threats will increase and mature in 2008: Web 2.0 and Client-Side Attacks, targeted Messaging attacks, botnets, threats targeting Mobile Convergence, and threats to RFID Systems.

HP issued several advisories warning of critical flaws in its System Management Homepage (SMH) for Linux, HP-Unix and Windows and certain systems running IP Filter packet filtering technology.

In its advisory to customers, HP said the SMH vulnerabilities could be exploited to allow a cross-site scripting attack. SMH versions prior to v2.1.10 running on Linux and Windows are affected, as well as SMH running on HP-UX versions B.11.11, B.11.23, and B.11.31.

IBM Lotus Quickr makes it easy for users to share business content. An important design principle of Lotus Quickr is to build the application on open interfaces that allow customers and partners to access content where and when they need it–otherwise known as the principle of information on demand. This article focuses on the Lotus Quickr Representational State Transfer (REST) services, including an overview and a simple example of how you can use them.

Maintaining IBM Lotus Domino V8 mail server scalability with the IBM Lotus Notes V8 client is critical, and this article shows that Lotus Domino V8 not only equals, but outperforms the previous release. It shows you how Lotus Domino V8 with the Lotus Notes V8 client performs across a variety of server platforms.

A regional bank in the U.S. said it was able to deflect most of a hacking attempt on its database, but not before some customer information was divulged. Commerce Bank, which operates banks in five U.S. states, said Tuesday that a hacker gained access to a database with about 3,000 customer records and accessed data belonging to 20 of them. The bank is contacting those who may have been affected.

The hacking was quickly detected and stopped, according to Commerce Bank, which then notified law enforcement.

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied an appeal by Hewlett-Packard to dismiss a class-action lawsuit against Compaq, which HP acquired in 2002. The lawsuit, filed in 2003 by Oklahoma residents Stephen and Beverly Grider, alleges that Compaq sold them a computer with a defective floppy disk drive. The company did not replace the faulty drive, the Griders alleged.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to intervene in the Oklahoma lawsuit on behalf of HP. The case now goes back to an Oklahoma state court. In 2005, the District Court of Cleveland County, Oklahoma, allowed the Grider lawsuit to become a nationwide class-action lawsuit. HP had appealed that decision.

Since 2000, several U.S. residents have filed similar lawsuits against Compaq and HP. The lawsuits alleged that Compaq sold computers with faulty floppy disk controllers, causing data loss or corruption.

Just three weeks after Mozilla spun off its Thunderbird to a new subsidiary, the only two paid developers working on the email client said they were quitting the company. Both Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu used terse blog posts last week to announce that their last day with Mozilla will be Friday.

Mozilla did not respond to questions and a request for comment on the departure of the two developers, who led the largely volunteer effort.