IBM and Nortel have reached new milestones in helping telecom carriers drive network convergence. It will give their subscribers a seamless voice, data and video communications experience across a wide range of devices accessed from any network–wireline, wireless or DSL/cable broadband. This includes fostering an expanded ecosystem for third parties to develop and test new converged applications, joint innovation centers, and Nortel integrating with IBM’s industry leading WebSphere software. In addition, the agreement facilitates the inclusion of Nortel Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) applications in IBM carrier solutions.

One "bad apple" can spread negative behavior like a virus to bring down officemates or destroy a good team, according to a new study examining conflict in the workplace. Negative behavior outweighs positive behavior, so a bad apple can spoil the whole barrel, but one or two good workers can’t "unspoil" it, researchers at the University of Washington said in the current issue of the journal Research in Organizational Behavior.

Solaris 10 is at risk of a zero-day exploit, due to security bugs in its telnet service, Sun Microsystems warned Tuesday. The "highly critical" vulnerabilities could enable attackers to gain unauthorized access to a user’s system without requiring the user to download exploit code, said Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the Sans Institute, which also issued a security advisory.

When it comes to hulking server designs, IBM’s forthcoming Power6 chip one-ups its predecessor’s multiprocessor abilities by a factor of two. IBM’s current Power5+ chip works in servers with as many as 32 of the dual-core processors. Power6, though, jumps ahead with 64-chip support, said Power6 architect Brad McCredie and Josh Friedrich, who led work on Power6’s memory subsystem.

Researchers at McAfee said malware is hitting mobile device users around the world at increasing rates. The study, which was performed by Informa Telecoms and Media and sponsored by McAfee, found 83 percent of mobile operators surveyed have been hit by mobile device infections, and that nearly half of the operators that have experienced mobile malware outbreaks have had one within the last three months.

Visto Corporation, the partner company behind mobile email services from more than 30 of the world’s largest mobile service providers, announced the findings of a survey the company commissioned to identify and target key drivers for mobile email adoption. Based on the research, Visto predicts that market penetration of mobile email could reach as high as 70 percent of mobile professionals by the end of 2007. Close to 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that, just a year ago, they regarded mobile email as solely the domain of the elite within an organization, too expensive, or limited to a few special devices. Today, those attitudes have changed, with 70 percent believing that the service had become less exclusive, more affordable, and with far greater device choice.

Optimism about the economy and anxiety about security are leading companies to increase IT spending. Welcome to the most comprehensive report on IT spending CIO Insight has ever produced. Unlike previous years’ surveys, where only project-related spending on applications and infrastructure were tracked, this study asked respondents about any and all spending on these technologies. CIO Insight has also broadened the field to 50 different technologies and services. With 429 respondents holding senior level IT positions, the result is a full picture of where IT spending is heading in 2007.

Over the next seven years, service offshoring is expected to have a relatively small impact on the overall U.S., but a sharply felt one on IT-concentrated metropolitan regions, finds a new report. While the loss of service jobs to offshoring in the near future will be modest, metropolitan areas with large concentrations of IT and back-office jobs will be harder hit, finds a report released Feb. 12 by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based independent research group. Large metropolitan areas in the northeast and west were found to be the most vulnerable to service offshoring, more than their small metropolitan and midwestern and southern counterparts.

CA has announced eight IT management software packages that evaluate, monitor and exploit IBM’s System z9 Integrated Information Processor, or zIIP, by taking advantage of the zIIP’s ability to offload selected computing tasks from a mainframe’s general-purpose processors. CA revealed the packages Feb. 12 at the SHARE Technology Exchange in Tampa. The new CA packages enable IT organizations to fine-tune application performance and to extend zIIP-eligible workloads to include functions such as network packet analysis and data encryption, a company spokesperson said.

A group of major media companies has accused Google of benefiting from the sale of pirated movies and providing business support to two Web sites suspected of offering access to illegal film downloads, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday. The media companies, which the paper said include News Corp., Viacom Inc., Sony Corp., General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co., allege that Google deliberately directed traffic to Web sites that were engaged in fostering piracy, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter. Google told the studios on Friday it would implement new procedures to prevent recurrences, the Journal said.