IBM announced that customers around the world are still obtaining tangible business results with APL, an array programming language invented 40 years ago. IBM is commemorating the anniversary at events in California, Germany and other locations. APL is one of the most concise, consistent, and powerful programming languages ever devised, and other popular programming languages have spawned from its development. Originally created in 1966 by the late Dr. Kenneth E. Iverson of IBM Research, APL began as a notation to describe mathematical ideas, consisting of a set of symbols and a syntax to describe the processing of data. APL is used by both application developers and interactive end-users for problem-solving, visualization and database access. APL and its derivative version, APL2, is widely used in a diverse set of application areas, such as commercial data processing, system design and prototyping, engineering and scientific computation, and the teaching of mathematics and other subjects. APL is extremely effective in such diverse areas as "what-if" modeling, exploratory programming, interactive computing, decision support and data analysis.

U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the emails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees thanks to new federal rules that go into effect Friday, legal experts say. The rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce "electronically stored information" as part of the discovery process, when evidence is shared by both sides before a trial. The change makes it more important for companies to know what electronic information they have and where. Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing the equivalent of "virtual shredding," said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation.

McAfee’s Avert Labs research group has released its annual report on the Top 10 security threats likely to grow in severity during the coming year, highlighting expectations for continued professionalism among malware code writers and a range of attacks on emerging technology platforms in 2007. The trend toward malware writers and online fraudsters who bring a high level of professionalism to their work will dominate the IT threat landscape, according to Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee Avert Labs.

Like other information security training companies, The Hacker Academy offers standard five day "white hat" hacking courses and on-site training, but now comes an interesting twist… Midnight Hacking. "Why do we need to put a limit on learning," says Aaron Cohen, President of The Hacker Academy. "Both current and prospective students have called for a more time and cost effective way to learn how to think like a hacker and Midnight Hacking could be the answer." Unlike standard courses, the class will begin at 9pm and end sometime after midnight for two thorough nights of ethical hacker training. This class is designed to allow the busy IT professional who is unable to get away from the office for a full week or can’t secure budget to pay for a weeks worth of training to have a better working knowledge of real time security attacks and how defend against them.

We’ve received word that a respected member of our tech community, James Kim (whom many of you may know as CNET’s senior editor of digital audio), and his family have gone missing. As we understand it, last weekend James, his wife Kati, and his very young girls Penelope and Sabine, drove from their home in the SF Bay Area to Seattle. They were expected back some time Sunday, but were last seen by a hotel clerk at 5:45 PM on Saturday in or between Gold Beach or Portland, Oregon. If you have any information as to the Kim family’s whereabouts, please contact the SFPD at 415-558-5508 during normal business hours, and 415-553-1071 after hours.

An updated variant of a malicious bot program is spreading via a flaw in Symantec’s antivirus software as well as through several holes in Microsoft code. The program, called "Spybot.ACYR" by Symantec and "Sdbot.worm!811a7027" by McAfee, appears to be targeting educational institutions, according to a blog item posted by Symantec Tuesday.

The name of the game for companies is "prepare for the worst; hope for the best." Companies can minimize the worst possible disruptions to their businesses and the lives of their employees by creating disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Such plans are not just for large and well-connected companies, but for small and midmarket companies as well. These plans can protect company data and applications, and they can have a company back in business within 48 hours or less after a disaster. That’s where savvy solution providers come in.

SWING Software announced the release of SWING Integrator 5–an Office integration toolkit for Lotus Notes and Domino developers. The new release adds OpenOffice integration with IBM Lotus Notes applications. SWING Integrator 5 lets Lotus developers integrate MS Office Word and Excel, or OpenOffice Write and Calc to their own Lotus Notes solutions.

Symantec continued its concerted push into the data center automation space by introducing two key new features to augment its Veritas Server Foundation product–an application director and a patch manager. Symantec also announced that it has updated both its Veritas Configuration Manager and Veritas Provisioning Manager. Veritas Application Director enables IT to control when and where multitiered applications run across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments in order to maximize server utilization and application availability. Veritas Patch Manager adds patch management and distribution functionality to the existing operating system and application provisioning capabilities to Veritas Server Foundation.

According to a study by nCircle, 59 percent of IT security professionals said they are much more wary of online shopping transactions than they were two years ago. "IT security professionals know better than anyone the risk inherent in online shopping and this survey data highlights how much work the retail industry must do to ensure a secure online shopping experience," said Abe Kleinfeld, CEO of nCircle, a provider of enterprise-class vulnerability and risk management solutions.