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IBM is entering the stream computing arena.

In a keynote address at the 2007 Technology Management Conference and Expo in New York on June 19, William Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive for IBM’s Systems and Technology Group is introducing its System S prototype. System S is a software architecture that originated in IBM Research.

IBM officials said the company chose the New York event for the technology’s introduction because Wall Street firms are among the world’s most aggressive users of IT and typically have demanding requirements to crunch data on the fly to profit from real-time decision making and risk mitigation.

Email records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the Republican National Committee, the House Oversight Committee said Monday.

The Bush administration may have committed "extensive" violations of a law requiring that certain records be preserved, said the committee’s Democratic chairman, adding that the panel will deepen its probe into the use of political email accounts.

Researchers at Trend Micro are reporting that as many as 10,000 Web sites have been infected with malicious code that redirects unsuspecting users to a server booby-trapped with drive-by exploits–part of a wave of attacks originating in Italy and now spreading through Europe.

Dubbed the "Italian Job" by Trend Micro, the attack was first uncovered June 15. Legitimate sites were hacked to include a malicious iFrames tag redirecting visitors to servers armed with a tool called MPack, an exploit tool that can target security holes in multiple products.

You may not know that your computer is sending spam, being used as a pawn in coordinated Internet attacks, hosting illegal files, or otherwise part of the malware-distribution network known as the zombie horde. Some estimates peg the number of email spams sent each day at around 55 billion, the vast majority of which are sent by infected PCs, usually without any knowledge of it by their owner.

It’s all part of what’s known as a botnet, giant networks of malware-infected PCs that act as slaves to a master controller via the Internet. These PCs, called zombies, are perhaps the biggest security threat on the Internet today.

And now the FBI wants to do something about it. How? It’s directly contacting a million PC owners to let them know what they ought to have known all along: That their computers are infected and are being hijacked for nefarious uses. The goal is to help track down the source of these infections and put the hackers responsible behind bars. "Operation Bot Roast" has already led to the arrest of three scammers.

In a break with other Internet service providers, AT&T will work with Hollywood studios and recording labels to devise technology that identifies offshore content pirates who use its network to upload illegal copies of movies and music.

Although details remain sketchy, the effort worries privacy advocates, who fear the San Antonio-based company could become a beat cop, monitoring which Web sites customers visit and what computer files they share.

Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros on June 4 signed a broad set of collaboration and patent agreements that reminded many of the November 2006 Microsoft/Novell partnership. What do analysts and other Linux vendors think this new deal means for Linux?

While the FSF (Free Software Foundation) has tried to block such patent deals with the latest version of the GPLv3, Microsoft and Xandros didn’t let that legal objective stop them.

Nortel and IBM are teaming up to launch an integrated suite of voice over IP and multimedia applications running on IBM’s System i server, which is popular with small and midsize enterprises.

The integrated offering will turn System i servers into IP PBXes capable of supporting a mix of IP telephony applications and collaboration applications such as IBM’s Lotus Sametime instant messaging, Web collaboration, presence, whiteboarding and other applications.

IBM has released the Informix Dynamic Server 11, a new data server company officials expect to give them a leg up in the global database market.

IDS 11, code-named "Cheetah," offers significant cost savings with support for cluster tools and, through a feature code-named "Mach 11," provides failover recovery from any node to ensure continuous business operations.

McAfee put a new version of its security management software, ePolicy Orchestrator, in its holster and is taking aim at rival vendor Symantec and its Endpoint Protection Version 11, code-named Hamlet.

ePolicy Orchestrator, or ePo, serves as a management console across McAfee’s security products. The new version, 4.0, was made available in beta June 11 and includes improved Web-based controls, configurable reports and other enhancements aimed at making it easier for IT personnel to manage multiple security and compliance applications. The product is designed to take a holistic approach to security, providing centralized management capabilities for endpoint and network security as well as risk and compliance, said Vimal Solanki, senior director of worldwide product marketing for McAfee.

Armed with these new features, Solanki launched into an attack on Symantec’s Hamlet.