Software makers are at the mercy of bug hunters when it comes to flaw disclosure, Mozilla’s security chief said Saturday.

The software industry for years has pushed guidelines for vulnerability disclosure. Those "responsible disclosure" efforts have had some effect, but security researchers maintain control over the process, Mozilla Security Chief Window Snyder said in a panel discussion at the ShmooCon hacker event.

For many managers at global companies, 70-hour weeks are becoming the norm. A global study in the Harvard Business Review showed more than 50 percent of male executives and more than 80 percent of women executives working 60 hours a week or more said they would not be able to keep it up for more than a year.

Women tend to quit such jobs after a few years, the study shows. Men often stay but more than 40 percent who worked those hours experienced "brown-out" within five years and had lost their creative zeal.

What is the state of the enterprise IT workplace today?

Employee rotation in and out of IT roles was the theme of the day at Forrester’s Teleconference on the Enterprise IT Career March 19, correlated with more successful recruitment and better worker retention. Yet only a minority of firms embraced these concepts.

Scientists at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory have developed a glue-application technique used to assemble chips that will keep them running cooler, the company said.

Glues are used to bind the semiconductor packages, such as microprocessors and chipsets, with cooling elements that disperse the heat generated by today’s powerful chips. However, current glues, which are embedded with microscopic particles of metal or ceramics to help transfer heat, continue to be an obstacle to efficient heat dissipation, IBM said.

Japan’s Hitachi said it would close a parts factory in Mexico and cut 4500 jobs as it aims to shave $300 million in costs in its loss-making hard disk drive business over the next five years.

Hitachi , which bought IBM’s disk drive operations in 2002 for $2 billion, said it aimed to boost hard drive sales by up to 40 percent in calendar 2007. It said sales volume may slow until June but it expects them to pick up in the second half.

The war between Oracle and SAP is about to move beyond enterprise applications to the courtroom.

Oracle said that it has sued SAP "about corporate theft on a grand scale" seeking undisclosed damages. Oracle also argues that the theft formed the basis of SAP’s "Safe Passage" program, which is designed to entice Oracle customers to switch to SAP. SAP won’t comment until it has reviewed the complaint.

Form Automation Solutions will be introducing its enterprise software solution, AuditMatic v4.0, which eliminates paper-based manual systems for mobile data collection, reporting and analysis, at the CTIA Wireless show March 27-29 in Orlando.

AuditMatic enables non-technical managers to create, publish and distribute data collection forms to mobile workers equipped with handheld computers or smartphones. The mobile workers upload the collected data to the AuditMatic server, which processes it and makes it accessible to the manager in real time by means of a dashboard on the computer screen.

Certain Adobe Systems software, including Creative Suite 2, Serious Magic software, Macromedia Studio, and any Adobe products made available on or after Jan. 30, may not work properly with the Windows Vista operating system.

In an FAQ on its Web site, Adobe indicates that the above-mentioned products, as well as Photoshop, InDesign and Dreamweaver, have compatibility issues with the Windows Vista.

For example, Adobe Photoshop CS2 calls for users to register the software every time it is launched on a Windows Vista PC, even if the software has already been registered by the user.

The AMBER Alert Child ID Kit is a portable flash drive that plugs right into any USB port. The kit allows parents to constantly update important information about their children such as hair color, photos and medical conditions–even about their child’s MySpace page–in a secure, convenient, and almost indestructible location that can be provided to authorities at a moments notice.

AMBERalert.com has teamed up with Kingston Technology to make the Child ID Kits available. Law enforcement agencies agree that time is of the essence when it comes to ensuring the safe return of an abducted child.

The cost advantage of offshoring declined in 2006, found the Global Services Location Index released by A.T. Kearney, a Washington-based global consulting firm.

The report found that although the wage advantage of offshoring locations for office services is set to last for another 20 years, it is on the decline as offshore wages for IT, business process and call center services have risen. But even under the most aggressive projections of wage inflation and currency appreciation, however, offshore locations will still have the price advantage for the foreseeable future, found the report.