Google is converting its renowned headquarters to run partly on solar power, hoping to set an example for corporate America. The Internet search leader announced what is believed to be the largest solar project undertaken by a U.S. company during a solar energy conference in Silicon Valley on Monday. Google believes the sun eventually can deliver as much as 30 percent of the power at its 1-million-square-foot campus in Mountain View–a suburb about 35 miles south of San Francisco.

IBM today announced a comprehensive software and solutions strategy expected to provide customers with the industry’s most advanced and complete identity recognition solutions for uncovering and managing potential threats and fraudulent activity by individuals and groups attempting to mask, hide, or misrepresent their identities. IBM’s Threat & Fraud Intelligence strategy will enable five focused solution portfolios with a common, extensible and re-usable technology platform–each tailored to meet the needs of a specific industry or focus area.

IBM today introduced software aimed at helping clients build more profitable customer relationships through master data management. IBM WebSphere Customer Center 7.0–part of IBM’s master data management family of products–is designed to help businesses achieve a single version of the truth across all of their business processes from customer treatment to product performance. Transforming toward a customer-centric view allows organizations to tailor product and service offerings to customer preferences across multiple touch points–the Web, call centers or sales representatives–and to increase customer loyalty. In doing so, businesses can create more effective cross-and up-sell campaigns, product bundles and high-touch interactions, while maintaining a cross-enterprise record of customer transactions.

Hewlett-Packard has appointed a new chief ethics and compliance officer in the wake of the controversy surrounding its investigation into news leaks over the past two years. Jon Hoak, former senior vice president and general counsel for NCR, is replacing Kevin Hunsaker, one of five people charged in California last week with four felonies in connection with the internal probe.

A botnet is a collection of broadband-enabled PCs, hijacked during virus and worm attacks and seeded with software that connects back to a server to receive communications from a remote attacker. And these botnets are everywhere. Now, there is a general feeling of hopelessness among security professionals involved in finding and disabling botnets. It remains to be seen how this despair affects security products and the attitudes of the technology executives who rely on them.

Some of the most dangerous cyberattacks are the least visible ones. Widespread worms, viruses or Trojan horses spammed to millions of mailboxes are typically not a grave concern anymore, security experts said at the Virus Bulletin conference. Instead, especially for organizations, targeted Trojan horses have become the nightmare scenario, they said.

eWEEK spoke to a range of IT professionals about what they considered the bare-bones computer tasks that every employee should be able to perform–aspects of daily work they’d consider almost inexcusable to request frequent help with. Almost, they said, insisting that they didn’t mind helping workers, as long as the workers would try to help themselves first.

Like a hurricane on the horizon (which, fortunately, we’ve managed to avoid this season), Internet Explorer 7 is getting closer and closer. In fact, if reports are to be believed, IE7 is about the make landfall in the next few days — and it’s coming to your PC whether you want it or not. In this important article, we show you how to prevent it from automatically installing.

Read this DominoPower article.

If you don’t like what your favorite Internet search engine or e-commerce site does with information it collects about you, your options are limited to living with it or logging off. Major search engines, for instance, all keep records of your searches for weeks, months or even years, often tied to your computer’s Internet address or more. Retailers, meanwhile, generally presume the right to send marketing emails. Although online companies have become better at disclosing data practices, privacy advocates say the services’ stated policies generally don’t give consumers real choice.

A federal judge in Arkansas has thrown out a class action lawsuit against Acxiom, which exposed massive amounts of Americans’ personal information in a high-profile Internet security snafu three years ago. Even though a spammer had downloaded more than one billion records from the company, U.S. District Judge William Wilson ruled that there was no evidence that Acxiom’s purloined database had been used to send junk e-mail or postal mail. Because the class action attorneys could not prove that anyone’s information had actually been misused, Wilson dismissed the case and the request for damages on the grounds that any harm would be entirely speculative.