The early onset of daylight saving time in the United States this year may have been for naught.

The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort.

But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.

Even as the federal government appears poised to create new consumer data protection laws in 2007, businesses and privacy advocates in the United States remain at odds over the parameters of such legislation and its potential impact.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are currently reviewing a handful of high-profile bills that seek to place stricter requirements on organizations that collect sensitive consumer information, and establish national guidelines for public disclosure of data breaches.

Economists project that India will become one of the largest economies in the world by 2050. Its growth rate last year was put at 19 percent.

IBM, which already has more than 50,000 employees in India and an investment of $6 billion, announced that it will expand its operations even further with the creation of an Autonomic Computing Technology Center in Bangalore, India.

IBM has patched multiple flaws in its Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment that allowed attackers to crash the service or execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges.

The vulnerabilities exist in the handling of multi-part/form-data HTTP POST requests, according to an advisory by Sterling, Va.-based iDefense Labs. Malformed requests can cause invalid memory accesses, leading to denial of service or possibly heap corruption.

Texas is suing RadioShack after the retailer’s employees dumped thousands of customer records in garbage bins behind a store near Corpus Christi, Texas, on March 21. The records contained Social Security numbers, credit and debit card information, names, addresses and telephone numbers, according to investigators.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott late on Monday filed documents charging that RadioShack had violated a 2005 law–the 2005 Identity Theft Enforcement and Protection Act–requiring businesses to protect and properly destroy any consumer records that contain sensitive information, including Social Security and bank account numbers.

Chinese computer maker Lenovo has topped a ranking of the world’s most eco-friendly electronics firms. Compiled by Greenpeace, the quarterly report ranks firms by how green their production processes are and what they do to recycle hardware they sell.

In previous reports Lenovo ranked low for eco-friendliness but in 2007 it scooped the top spot over Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Dell, and Samsung.

Apple came last of the 14 firms Greenpeace profiled in the report.

A British man has lost his High Court fight against extradition to the US for allegedly carrying out the "biggest military computer hack of all time".

Glasgow-born Gary McKinnon, of north London, is accused of gaining access to 97 US military and Nasa computers.

Home Secretary John Reid granted the US request to extradite him for trial.

CertFX announced a 25% discount on all available CertFX Practice Tests. All products are discounted 25%. To take advantage of this opportunity visit the CertFX Web site and use the following coupon code at checkout time: AprilShower. This offer is available for the entire month of April.

CertFX has updated many of the tests that were released earlier this year based upon customer feedback and update to exams. Existing customers can press Update to receive the latest version.

In addition, CertFX has added two Volume Packages for direct purchase from the Web.

Connect with the world’s top Notes/Domino experts at ADMIN2007 and Lotus Developer2007, co-located in Boston, June 4-6. Learn from their proven techniques and extensive real-world experiences to help tackle the administration and development issues you face everyday and get up to speed on Notes/Domino 8 and other new technologies.

Thousands of Notes/Domino professionals have turned to THE VIEW’s ADMIN and Developer events for the real-world information and technical resources they need to make their jobs easier, advance their skills and solve their toughest challenges. These three-day intensive training events feature everything to help you conquer today’s challenges and prepare for the future.

To honor an employee’s son who was badly wounded in Iraq, IBM plans to give the U.S. military $45 million worth of Arabic-English translation technology that the Pentagon had been testing for possible purchase.

The offer–made from the highest reaches of the company directly to President Bush–is so unusual that Defense Department and IBM lawyers have been scouring federal laws to make sure the government can accept the donation.