Hewlett-Packard is commenting little on a published report that the HP board is dropping Larry Sonsini as its primary outside legal counsel. "HP continues to have a relationship with Wilson Sonsini," HP spokeswoman Emma Wischhusen said Thursday afternoon, referring only to the name of the Palo Alto, California, law firm of which Sonsini is chairman. The New York Times reported Thursday that HP plans to replace Larry Sonsini as outside legal counsel to the board next year. Sonsini figured in the spying scandal that has embroiled the technology company this year.

The Thunderbird email client doesn’t get half the attention that its big brother, the Firefox browser, gets, but the Mozilla Foundation has finally gotten around to lavishing some love on it, and the first beta of version 2 is now out. If you think there’s nothing more that can be added to an email client–except for the fabled seek-out-and-destroy-spam option–prepare to be pleasantly surprised. The new Thunderbird comes with numerous new features.

Now you can use IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, a free downloadable search engine, to crawl and index up to half a million Web pages or file system documents. In this article, learn how to use Eclipse plug-ins to integrate the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! search interface into various display areas of the IBM Lotus Sametime Connect client.

In a strongly worded rebuttal, Amazon.com has countersued IBM. The companies have charged each other with patent infringement. The countersuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, denies that Amazon.com infringes IBM patents, seeks to invalidate some IBM patents and charges IBM with infringing on some Amazon.com patents. IBM illegally uses Amazon.com technology in WebSphere, a widely deployed application server, as well as in IBM information management services and products, Amazon.com claims.

About 450 workers at the Dulles headquarters of AOL were laid off Wednesday as the company continues restructuring away from its traditional roots as a subscription-based provider of dial-up Internet access. AOL announced in August that it planned to cut about 5,000 jobs–or roughly a fourth of its global workforce–as it embarked on major changes designed to shift the company’s revenue stream from subscription fees to online advertising. Many of AOL’s key features, like e-mail accounts, are now available for free.

Boeing officials confirmed that a laptop containing the personal data of some 382,000 current and former employees was stolen from a former employee’s car in the first week of December. Officials of the Seattle-based company declined to say exactly when or where the theft occurred, but stated that the data stored on the laptop contained Social Security numbers, home addresses and telephone numbers. The employee has since been fired, Boeing spokesperson Tim Neale said.

German researcher Stefan Esser has quit the PHP Security Response Team in disgust, accusing the open-source group of hiding the slow response time to fixing vulnerabilities and, even worse, refusing to fix known flaws for months. Esser, one of the most prominent open-source security gurus, has "retired" from php@security.net–a group he founded–to concentrate on Suhosin, the double-barreled protection system for PHP installations.

A few weeks ago, in "Before you reinstall the Notes client, try this", we discussed some ways to clear up problems dealing with mail files. In response, Marleen Overkamp, a senior application developer with Exedra Solutions in The Netherlands, had some interesting suggestions.

Read this DominoPower article.

Al Shugart, a pioneer in the computer disk drive industry and one of Silicon Valley’s most colorful entrepreneurs, has died. He was 76. The founder of Seagate Technology, now the world’s largest maker of computer disk drives, died on Tuesday following complications from heart surgery, said Julie Still, a family friend and Seagate spokeswoman. Shugart, who once ran his dog Ernest as a candidate for Congress, was beloved at Seagate for his coach mentality in grooming young executives, despite a sometimes gruff manner.

By his own admission, James Pacenza was spending too much time in Internet chat rooms, in some of them discussing sex. He goes so far as to call his interest in inappropriate Web sites a form of addiction that stems from the post traumatic stress disorder he’s suffered since returning from Vietnam. Whatever it’s called, Pacenza’s chat-room habit cost him his job. After 19 years at IBM’s East Fishkill plant, Pacenza was fired in May, 2003, after a fellow employee noticed discussion of a sex act on a chat room open on Pacenza’s computer. IBM maintains that logging onto the Web site was a violation of its business conduct guidelines and a misuse of company property–and that it was well within its rights to terminate Pacenza’s employment. Pacenza and his attorney beg to differ. They filed suit in a New York U.S. District Court in July, 2004, seeking $5 million for wrongful termination. Earlier in the year, Pacenza had admitted to a superior that he had a problem with the Internet at home. Pacenza’s attorney, Michael Diederich Jr., alleges that the perception that Pacenza was addicted to the Internet caused IBM to fire first without asking questions or "even attempting to examine the situation." Diederich says there are several steps IBM could have taken, including limiting his Internet use or blocking certain sites.