Though it has come a long way from the gloom-and-doom days of the dot-com bust, the state of the IT workplace isn’t shiny and happy.

If you ask an IT pro what they think of their chosen career path, a surprising number might pause before giving you a litany of reasons that the technology workplace leaves them feeling unsettled.

They love what they do, but they’re not sure IT is a great place to be doing it anymore. Even worse, they’re not sure that they would encourage their own computer-inclined children to pursue the same line of work.

This is it. This is our final article on the White House email controversy (barring any new news from Washington, of course). It seems only fitting then, that we began our series with the question "Where have all the emails gone?" and we end this series with the questions that, in the main, remain to be answered.

Read this DominoPower article.

Cybercriminals need less technical expertise to conduct attacks to steal credit card numbers and other sensitive information thanks to a rising number of software packaged toolkits that automate most of the technical work.

Once purchased for only a few hundred dollars, the toolkit can be installed on a server to begin harvesting data. A software program produces reports that show attack successes and failures, how many users are infected and the location of the most lucrative targets. It also automatically receives exploit updates on new vulnerabilities that hackers are finding, said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer of San Jose, Calif.-based security vendor, Finjan.

Experts agree: Updating IT skills is a good thing. But for many IT professionals, the constant changes in technologies–and the need to stay on top of them–stresses them out.

Nicole Haggerty, an assistant professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, said constant innovation in technology often "destroys the competencies" of IT workers because new technologies come along that require new skills. Legacy technologies remain relevant, but the demand for those skills shrinks.

Haggerty and her colleagues closely studied more than a dozen IT professionals and assessed how they deal with stress on the job.

The defeat of Microsoft Relevant Products/Services’s Open XML proposal before the International Standards Organization is more than a small hiccup in the software Relevant Products/Services giant’s plans to make its document file format a global standard, some analysts now say.

"I think it’s a significant setback and that Microsoft will have to work on the specification itself in order to clear up what some people are saying are its inconsistencies," said research director Jim Murphy at AMR Research. The comments that accompanied the negative votes against Microsoft’s proposal will be discussed next February at an ISO ballot resolution meeting to be held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Over the past few years, much has been written about DB2 design and implementation best practices. There are many books, along with dozens of articles, that provide insight into how DB2 should be designed and integrated into applications. To provide some basic guidance for customers and business partners entering this maze, this article compiles a list of arguably the best practices to be considered during design and implementation of your application using IBM DB2 technology. The intended result of this article is a more effective and efficient DB2 implementation. This article is not intended to provide detailed performance best practices for existing DB2 customers and independent software vendors.

Three U.S. men and one man living in France have pleaded guilty to charges related to a stock manipulation scheme that included sending out tens of millions of spam messages to pump up the stock value of 15 companies, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The four men cost investors more than $20 million in their so-called pump-and-dump scheme, the DOJ said Sept. 6. Michael Saquella, also known as Michael Paloma, 47, of Mesa, Ariz., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria on Aug. 20. Lawrence J. Kaplan, 63, of Scottsdale, Arizona, pleaded guilty on July 25, in Alexandria to similar charges. Henry "Hank" J. Zemla, 38, of Harris Township, Michigan, also pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria on July 20.

China can keep on denying that its People’s Liberation Army is responsible for infiltrating government networks, but good luck denying that it’s pumping out the most malware on the planet.

Sophos nailed China as the top junk-spewer back in its July 2007 Sophos Threat Report. In the report, Sophos said that China servers are behind 44.8 percent of the world’s malware-infected sites. That’s more than the next three top countries serving junk combined: the United States, at 20.8 percent, Russia with 11.3 percent, and Ukraine, at 7.7 percent.

For most businesses today, the face that they show to customers, partners and the world, isn’t their CEO or founder or spokesperson, it’s their Web site. Often the first impression that a person will form about your company will come when they visit your Web site.

Given that knowledge, one would think that businesses would put a lot of time and effort into putting the best "Web face" on their company as possible. But that often isn’t the case. Many company Web sites, and the Web applications that they offer to customers, are riddled with bugs, flaws and outright errors that can make your top-flight business look like cheap amateurs.

Most service-oriented architecture projects fail to deliver ROI, according to a new report from Nucleus Research Inc. Nucleus Research surveyed 106 organizations and found that only 37% of SOA projects demonstrated ROI.