IBM announced the next step in the growth of its Express Advantage strategy for mid-sized businesses with the introduction of new solutions for the industrial manufacturing, automotive, fashion and apparel, chemicals, and food and beverage industries. IBM also announced a range of new Express Advantage technology offerings from across its Software, Systems and Technology Services groups.

IBM Express Advantage combines a comprehensive portfolio of technology offerings and financing options, with a network of local IBM Business Partners and customer support capabilities to create a powerful, end-to-end approach to helping mid-sized customers increase efficiency, innovate and grow. As part of its ongoing investment in SMB, IBM also announced the expansion of Express Advantage to additional countries, bringing the total to over 30 since launching the initiative in North America last year.

IBM unveiled a preview of its new mashup platform to allow non-technical users to create situational applications in minutes, empowering line of business professionals to get the information they need no matter where it resides. The IBM Mashup Starter Kit, available today on IBM alphaWorks, enables line of business users to assemble their own Web 2.0 mashup applications, solving business problems without aid from information technology specialists.

The IBM Mashup Starter Kit contains two key technologies. The IBM Mashup Hub is a mashup server that stores information feeds such as in the RSS, ATOM or XML formats to enable reuse and collaboration. Mashup Hub can also merge, transform, filter, annotate or publish information in new formats. From there, the newly-enhanced QEDWiki serves as the user interface and allows non-IT users to "mash" information from any data source to create a single view of disparate sets of information in minutes. Together, this package of software collects and processes information that ultimately provides data for next generation applications.

When SCO went for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it was thought that SCO was doing it in part to avoid losing its cash reserves and more to Novell in the next stage of the Novell/SCO lawsuit. Now, Novell is pursuing SCO from the IP (intellectual property) courts to the bankruptcy courts.

SCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sept. 14. This came after SCO had been slammed by one defeat after another in its anti-Linux lawsuits. Most recently, the U.S. District Court ruled that Novell, not SCO, owned Unix’s intellectual property. This cracked the foundation to many of SCO’s other lawsuits.

According to a report released by the nonprofit high-tech industry trade association AeA, 118,500 jobs were added to the U.S. high-tech industry between January and June of 2007, bringing the total to 5.94 million jobs.

Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report splits the high-tech industry into four categories: high-tech manufacturing, communications services, software services, and engineering and tech services. Manufacturing showed the most modest gains, adding 1,800 jobs. Communications services were next, adding 12,900, followed by software services and engineering and tech services, which added 51,100 and 52,600 jobs, respectively.

Adobe has posted a workaround for a critical zero-day flaw in its widely-used programs for making and reading .pdf documents. Attackers could exploit the flaw to hijack Windows machines.

The flaw affects Adobe Reader 8.1 and earlier versions, Adobe Acrobat Standard, Professional and Elements 8.1 and earlier versions; and Adobe Acrobat 3D. Millions of people use Adobe Acrobat to create .pdf documents and Adobe Reader to view them. Researcher Petko D. Petkov first disclosed the security hole Sept. 20, writing in the GNUCitizen blog that "the issue is quite critical given the fact that .pdf documents are in the core of today’s modern business. This and the fact that it may take a while for Adobe to fix their closed-source product are the reasons why I am not going to publish any POCs (proof-of-concept code)."

Security software vendor McAfee will acquire SafeBoot for $350 million in an effort to expand its large-business product line, the company announced Monday. The acquisition of SafeBoot, a security software vendor focusing on encryption and access control, will expand McAfee’s risk management services, the company said. SafeBoot focuses on the large-business and mobile security markets.

SafeBoot, a private company based in the Netherlands, will be a "strong complement" to McAfee’s existing offerings, McAfee said in a press release. The data protection market is "highly underpenetrated," the company added.

A malicious hacker broke into an eBay server on Friday and temporarily suspended the accounts of a "very small" number of members, the company said.

"We were able to block the fraudster quickly before any permanent damage had been done. At no point did the fraudster get any access to financial information or other sensitive information," eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe said via email.

eBay has "secured and restored" the affected accounts and is calling the affected users, she said, without specifying how many accounts the hacker accessed and tinkered with. "The fraudster did this by accessing externally visible servers, not by hacking into the eBay site," Sharpe said.

Here’s a short piece with some tips on using Notes views programmatically from LotusScript. And it may be a first for DominoPower: it was written entirely with the Notes 8 document editor.

Read this DominoPower article.

Subscribers to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security daily email bulletin were inundated with dozens of emails on Wednesday due to a glitch with the mailing list. The gaffe started after one man, Alex Greene, a manager at GKN Freight Services, sent a reply to the Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report, a round-up of security-related news reports, to change his subscription information.

The email server sent Greene’s reply to everyone on the DHS’s subscriber list, which sent off a torrent of responses from recipients–some humorous, some irritable–which in turn were fired out again to all subscribers, according to the SANS Institute, a computer security monitoring organization. The cause of the problem was likely an erroneous change in the email server’s settings. The error could cause big trouble if a hacker sent a bad email attachment with a zero-day security vulnerability "to nail a few dozen gullible security professionals," Marcus Sachs wrote in the SANS diary, which documents security incidents.

Storagepipe Solutions has launched its Service Provider Platform, targeted specifically to service providers and value added resellers across North America. The online data backup platform will debut at IBM Information on Demand 2007 in Las Vegas, October 14-17, 2007.

The Storagepipe Service Provider Platform protects critical files from alteration, deletion, viruses and corruptions, increases user productivity, simplifies management of the backup and recovery function and is scalable as systems expand in complexity and user bases expand in size. It also delivers centralized protection for all systems. The platform is a turn-key solution including hardware and software as well as comprehensive training and includes sales and marketing support to ensure the success of service providers.