Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s vice president of technical strategy and innovation, who led most of the company’s big-bet moves into new technology arenas, has retired. How do you say goodbye to a legend? Well, if you’re IBM, you don’t. You just let them "retire" and you continue to tap their expertise on a part-time basis.

That’s what IBM is doing with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the company’s just-retired vice president of technical strategy and innovation. Wladawsky-Berger just retired in June after 37 years on the job. But he will stay on in a part-time capacity, doing pretty much what he’d been doing for the last several years–looking for new technologies and new markets IBM should get into and then figuring out the way the company should attack the opportunity.

Italy has become the latest country to clamp down on phishing, with authorities there arresting 26 people for an alleged scam to swindle bank customers.

According to a statement by one of those arrested, the scam involved sending fraudulent emails that appeared to come from Poste Italiane, the country’s postal operator, which also offers bank accounts, insurance and loans, according to a news release (in Italian) from the Guardia di Finanza, which handles financial crimes.

The emails urged victims to hand over sensitive financial information, which was then used to draw money from their accounts, the finance authority said. Eighteen of those arrested are Italian citizens, with the remainder from Eastern European countries.

People have always been the weakest link when it comes to protecting computers. The same applies to mobile phones. Despite companies’ attempts to create relatively secure operating systems, trickery and social engineering continue to manipulate people.

Runald acknowledges that some problems may be caused by unclear instructions on the user interface. But by and large, he said, security problems are caused by people ignoring warning signs.

IBM and DataMirror announced an agreement for IBM to acquire DataMirror based in Markham, Ontario. Under the agreement, IBM will acquire all of the outstanding DataMirror common shares at a price of C$27.00 per common share payable in cash, amounting to total consideration of approximately C$170 million (approximately $161 million USD).

DataMirror is a provider of technology that identifies and captures data that has been added, updated or deleted and allows the changed data to be delivered in real time to processes, applications and databases, ensuring that continuous, accurate and trusted information is available for decision-making.

The acquisition of DataMirror will further IBM’s cross-company Information on Demand business initiative, aimed at capturing the growing market opportunity for enabling customers to use information as a competitive and strategic business asset. IBM’s strategy is to provide customers with the data they need–when they need it–to help them quickly respond to changing market demands, rapidly identify new business opportunities, and improve business results.

The Windows Mobile Business Value Calculator gives you immediate visibility into the impact of deploying mobile business solutions on the Windows Mobile platform. Using a company’s unique information, such as number of mobile workers or types of applications to be mobilized, and summary data from IDC, the Business Value Calculator allows you to quantify the benefits and the direct and indirect costs of deploying mobile line-of-business applications, including measurable impact on revenue and income, operating expense savings, productivity enhancements, and other strategic business improvements. The resulting value metrics will help you build the business case for choosing Windows Mobile as the standard platform across your organization.

It may seem that our story of the controversy over White House email is unique to the George W. Bush White House. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, controversy over how the White House uses email dates back almost as far as email’s very existence. In this fascinating (and slightly disturbing) article, we take you through White House email and the White House’s attempts to hide email records for the past 25 years.

Read this DominoPower article.

Learn the next series of steps to develop a SonicESB process containing several services that interact to perform a sample Travel Agency Flow. You will use detailed step-by-step instructions to configure Sonic to expose the Travel Agency Process as a Web service. Code is developed and tested with IBM Rational(R) Application Developer.

Fed up with U.S. immigration hurdles, Microsoft announced July 5 plans to open a software development center in Vancouver, British Columbia, that it hopes will "be home to software developers from around the world."

Employing as many as 900 workers within a couple years, the facility, to be called the Microsoft Canada Development Centre, is slated to open in the fall of 2007, though the company said it has not yet determined who will staff the facility.

Analysts were quick to suggest that the move may signal the start of a new hiring trend, in which other technology companies, frustrated with the difficulty of bringing skilled foreign workers to the United States to staff their companies, will follow in Microsoft’s footsteps to Canada, where it is easier for foreign nationals to obtain work credentials.

There’s still no consensus regarding whether the zero-day vulnerability that security researcher Thor Larholm found is on Internet Explorer or on Firefox. But more to the point, there is a way to block the exploit, which otherwise could lead to remote system hijacking. According to Microsoft Security Program Manager Jesper Johansson, blocking the exploit boils down to deleting Firefox protocol handlers.

One way to kill the protocol handlers on multiple machines is to group policy script and SMS packages, he said. Rolling the fix out to thousands of machines can be done by creating a batch file deployed as a startup script. Larholm initially blamed the vulnerability on an input validation flaw in Internet Explorer that allows users to specify arbitrary arguments to the process responsible for handling URL protocols. It’s the same type of input validation vulnerability that Larholm discovered in the Safari 3 beta, he said.

IBM has launched an updated version of its AIX operating system, and for the first time Big Blue is looking to offer this OS as part of open beta program in order to entice more customers to its Unix platform.

In addition, IBM executives are detailing new features in AIX 6, including new virtualization capabilities in the operating system that complement the release of its Power6 processor, which debuted in May.