What to do if you don’t want to be left in the dark by the changes to DST this year. As confusing as the beginning of daylight-saving time can be in general, it will be even more confusing this year to the IT managers who have to make sure that their companies’ computing systems aren’t left in the dark by a new schedule. The United States will enter DST at 2 a.m. local time March 11–three weeks earlier than nearly all computer hardware and software written since 1986 are expecting. And DST 2007 will end one week later than this hardware and software expect–at 2 a.m. local time Nov. 4. These changes were mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It’s impossible to predict exactly what problems the DST changes will cause, but it’s likely that there will be a few missed meetings and issues with some time-sensitive transactions. For many users, the biggest problems will be that meetings scheduled through Microsoft’s Outlook and other calendaring programs may appear to start an hour earlier than actually planned. And some all-day events may appear to span two days if calendaring programs misinterpret the start and end time of a meeting.

Some of today’s best CIOS don’t stay CIOs. Dozens of former chief information officers now fill the top corporate jobs of chief executive and head of operations. They are the first movers in the rise of a new kind of CIO: an executive who transcends the role of technology manager to become, at once, a big thinker and someone who can tune operations with technology to drive a company.

Websense Security Labs is reporting a Trojan packed into an email that claims that Australia’s Prime Minister has suffered a heart attack. Websense says the Trojan monitors all of a user’s activity online, keeping track of Web sites visited and keylogging "everything you do," according to Websense’s email alert of Feb. 19. The Trojan includes a special phishing module, Websense reports. At the time of Websense’s alert, more than 2,500 victims were known to be affected, including a slew of banks–not surprising, given that phishers are increasingly targeting big financial pay dirt.

There’s traditionally been a bunker mentality among the people who secure email. It’s us against them, an unseen enemy flinging viruses and spam–little digital grenades that could blow a hole in the CEO’s inbox. Companies still need to have shields to block those Net threats, which continue to evolve in devious ways. Spending in this area, in fact, is expected to zoom. The worldwide market for email security products is estimated to grow from $3.5 billion in 2006 to more than $6 billion in 2010, says research firm The Radicati Group. And the underlying problems aren’t going away.

Hewlett-Packard reported a sharply higher quarterly profit Tuesday, thanks to strong computer and printer sales during the holidays, as the tech giant continues to gain momentum against struggling rival Dell. HP’s net income rose to $1.5 billion in the fiscal first quarter of 2007, or 55 cents a share, up 26 percent from $1.2 billion, or 42 cents a year ago. Excluding certain charges, the firm reported earnings per share of 65 cents. Wall Street had expected the top PC-maker to report 62 cents a share on that basis.

Watchfire has released a new vulnerability scanning and reporting tool aimed at finding security flaws early in the software development life cycle. Appscan Enterprise 5 features Web-based scanning and on-demand training designed to simplify application security for developers, Watchfire officials said. The product can be installed on a central server, making it easy for companies with a large workforce to deploy and monitor.

Alcoholics have one, and so do drug abusers. Now people addicted to email also have a 12-step program designed to tackle their obsession. An executive coach in Pennsylvania has devised a plan to teach people how to manage the electronic tool, which some users say can be as much an intrusive waste of time as it is fast-paced and efficient. Developed for cases such as a golfer who checked his BlackBerry after every shot, and lost a potential client who wanted nothing to do with his obsession, Marsha Egan’s plan taps into deepening concern that email misuse can cost businesses millions of dollars in lost productivity.

Oracle has released a new in-memory relational database designed to meet the faster response time needs of enterprises. Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Release 7 is the first major version of the TimesTen database developed internally by Oracle since the company purchased TimesTen, a startup firm that specialized in data management, in 2005. The new release supports familiar Oracle Database 10g data types, in-memory data caching and dozens of languages and database character sets.

Dell said it has hired the head of the Motorola mobile phone unit to oversee a new global consumer division, making him the second high-profile executive hired since Michael Dell returned as CEO to the company he founded. Ron Garriques will become president of Dell’s global consumer division, effective Feb. 19.

Red Hat, in collaboration with IBM, opened a support and research facility in Vrsac, Serbia, to serve customers in South Eastern Europe. The center will be managed by VDEL, an IT services distribution company, and will provide support, development and educational services to Red Hat customers, partners and developers in the region. IBM will offer the center access to its technologies and knowledge base so that in the future the center can also support IBM’s open source products. The companies will use the center to promote their security offerings since they have both earned security certificates for Common Criteria 4+, an international set of guidelines that companies can use to evaluate IT security.