IBM’s India Research Laboratory has developed the Resiliency Maturity Index, a framework that quantitatively assesses the ability of an organization to recover from a variety of disasters such as floods, power outages, software glitches, epidemics, and terrorist attacks.

The software tool, which IBM has used to assess the ability of its own global services delivery operations in India and Brazil to withstand disasters, also assists in telling organizations where they can best spend more money to improve their ability to cope with disasters, Guruduth Banavar, associate director at the Bangalore center of IBM India Research Laboratory, said Thursday.

A security firm has uncovered an easy-to-use, affordable tool for making a variety of customized Trojans–from downloaders to password stealers–on sale at several online forums. The tool, discovered by PandaLabs, is called Pinch, a tool that allows cybercriminals to specify what type of password they want their Trojans to steal–be it for email or system tools.

Pinch also has encryption capabilities to ensure that nobody intercepts stolen data. Pinch’s interface also has a SPY tab that lets criminals turn Trojans into keyloggers. In addition, the tool can design Trojans that snap screenshots from infected computers, steal browser data and look for specific files on the target system.

Pinch is impressive, but it’s just one sample of the array of crimeware for sale in malware markets and covered in a recent report from PandaLabs titled "The Price of Malware."

This article explains how to use the XML native data type in a non-Unicode database in DB2 Viper 2. Find tips on how to avoid substitution characters, pointers for query structuring and character reference usage, and explanations of the new utility user-defined functions shipping with the product.

Tune IBM Informix Dynamic Server and its different subsystems for optimum performance. After a brief overview, follow along with examples on how to look at the database server and its subsystems. The fourth in a series of eight tutorials, use this tutorial to help prepare for the IDS 11 exam 918.

Toshiba is recalling a small batch of laptop batteries that could overheat and burn users, a company spokesman said Thursday.

About 5,100 Sony-made lithium-ion batteries are defective, spanning 10 models of Toshiba computers, some of which are essentially the same model but carry a different name in different regions, said Manuel Linnig, Toshiba spokesman in Germany.

The latest recall involves a different type of battery than in September 2006 when more than 8 million rechargeable lithium-ion batteries made by Sony were recalled.

Want to run Domino on a Windows domain controller? Don’t. In this helpful article, Nancy Hand explains why it would be a very baaaaad idea.

Read this DominoPower article.

As CIOs have changed gears in the last few years from managing enterprise technology to driving business growth within their companies, the shift has also trickled down to what is demanded of the IT professionals within their organizations. Technology workers whose strengths lie in core areas of information and technology have become the most sought-after group and hold the most-difficult-to-fill positions. These difficulties are exacerbated by changing demands from the IT workers themselves, whose desires for work-life balance and growth opportunities within their jobs are more pronounced than before.

In the absence of these qualities in a job, they’re more willing than ever to leave, evidenced by an ever-increasing rate of IT employee-initiated turnover, according to Gartner’s 2007 IT Market Compensation Study released July 17.

BlackBerry devices and other smartphones may have had a huge impact on executive and employee productivity, but they also have a negative impact on work-life balance by making it more difficult to switch off from the office, according to a recent survey.

The study, conducted by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, found that an average BlackBerry user converts one hour of downtime to productive time each day and increases overall team efficiency by 38 percent.

Each member of Silicon.com’s 12-person CIO Jury IT user panel agreed that BlackBerry devices and smartphones have improved their productivity but warned that it can have a negative impact on work-life balance without judicious use of the off switch.

Lenovo Group reclaimed the number-three spot among PC vendors during the second quarter, pushing rival Acer back into fourth place. But Acer’s exceptionally fast growth means the company is likely to overtake Lenovo as number three for the entire year, if current trends continue.

Acer has been on a roll in recent quarters, grabbing market share and putting pressure on Lenovo. During the first quarter of 2007, Acer tied Lenovo for third place, with both companies reporting shipments of nearly 4 million PCs, giving each company 6.7 percent of the market, according to IDC.

With only two months left before government agencies must figure out how to deal with data breaches and data theft, federal bureaucrats are scrambling to meet the looming deadline.

The deadline was created by a White House directive published this spring that gave all federal agencies until September 22 to figure out the wisest way, using their "best judgment," to come up with a plan to secure Americans’ personal data and to alert them if it falls into the wrong hands.

Finishing everything by that date is "definitely a challenge," Mischel Kwon, chief IT security technologist for the U.S. Department of Justice, said Wednesday.