A newly identified malicious program not only messes up its victims’ computers, it taunts them too.

The program, called the BotVoice.A Trojan was first spotted by security vendor Panda Software last week. It is a Trojan horse program, which the victim must download first. But once installed, it gets nasty. The Trojan soon sets to work trying to delete everything from the victim’s hard drive, while at the same time endlessly repeating an audible message, apparently designed to taunt the victim.

"You have been infected; I repeat, you have been infected and your system files have been deleted. Sorry. Have a nice day and bye bye," the Trojan says.

It does this by using a text-reading program that is part of the Windows operating system, Panda said. Users of Windows 2003, XP, 2000, NT, ME, 98, and 95 are all at risk.

Unlike a virus, BotVoice.A does not jump from computer to computer on its own, but spreads via p-to-p (peer-to-peer) networks or storage devices such as CD-ROMs or USB memory drives.

What will be the next big offshoring frontier? While the experts don’t all have the same locations in mind, they all agree that it will no longer be in India.

Salary inflation is largely to blame for the change in course. When the outsourcing boom took off in 2004, the salaries of software engineers were one quarter of what San Francisco-area computer engineers made, making very clear the cost savings of offshoring.

But in the years since, Indian salaries have soared–in several cases to 75 percent of U.S. levels–and some in Silicon Valley have begun to sour on sending jobs to India, wrote the Wall Street Journal on July 3.

IBM and AGS have teamed up to offer security and management tools for the newest installment of IDS (Informix Dynamic Server).

AGS’ Server Studio and Sentinel R. 6.1 are aimed at forming an infrastructure of multi-platform tools to help database professionals manage IBM Informix data server environments.

Bernie Spang, IBM’s director of data servers, said the company’s long-term partnership with AGS underscores IBM’s commitment to providing IDS users with the performance optimization, availability and compliance management solutions they need.

All enterprises will have to find tools to secure Web services as Web-based languages, such as extensible markup language will be gradually introduced into system architectures. In a recent interview conducted at the Burton Group Catalyst conference, Chris Haddad, director of technical architecture at Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group discussed the growing use of XML gateway appliances and other tools enterprises are using to secure service interactions. "Developers today have the tools to produce Web services and there are a multitude of unmanaged, unsecured Web services inside an organization’s data center and across its application landscape," Haddad said. "Companies are realizing that they have to gain control of this environment." In this Q&A, Haddad talks about the evolution of SOA, the introduction of Web services and how early adopters are choosing to secure the Web-based messages being sent between applications and systems.

Fidelity National Information Services, an electronic payment processor, said on Tuesday a database administrator stole and sold customer data, exposing as many as 2.3 million bank and credit card records, and that the worker has been fired.

The employee, who worked at the company’s Certegy Check Services unit, sold the information to a data broker, which in turn sold some of it to a "limited number" of direct marketers.

These activities led to customers receiving marketing solicitations, though there is no evidence of fraud, Fidelity said. The stolen data include names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and bank account and card information.

Analysts practically wear themselves out saying "service-oriented architecture is something you do, not something you buy," but during last week’s Burton Group Catalyst Conference it became clear too many users are trying to take a shortcut to SOA by buying the latest got-to-have-it software package.

Burton analysts stressed that you don’t need to chase after some enterprise service bus with every possible widget or try to support the latest chic Web services standards in order to achieve service orientation.

"SOA is an enterprise architecture style, not an application architecture style," said Anne Thomas Manes, Burton Group vice president and research director. She estimated it could take 20 years to realize all the benefits of service orientation.

IBM Rational ClearCase is an enterprise-class software configuration management system that you can use in myriad configurations to satisfy virtually any artifact versioning and storage requirements. However, this very flexibility can make it difficult for you to choose the best way to use ClearCase to manage modeling projects. This article discusses several options, and recommends some best practices for using ClearCase with models in IBM Rational Software Architect.

Building IBM Lotus Sametime on top of Lotus Expeditor lets you use Eclipse as a Plug-in Development Environment to extend Lotus Sametime’s functionality in many ways. This article, part 2 of a four-part series, shows how to develop the BuddyNote plug-in from scratch.

An organic climate change lobby group has issued green ratings for hardware and software-based IT suppliers as well as other businesses. IBM leads the IT pack while Apple, Amazon and eBay are bottom with zero green credentials.

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb," the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned. Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats. Microsoft’s UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age".