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Yahoo is holding its first public "Hack Day" at the end of September for developers to spend 24 hours building applications around Yahoo’s APIs. On Sept. 29-30, Yahoo will open up its Sunnyvale campus to 500 developers for a free all-day developer workshop, followed by what the company calls a 24-hour "hack-through-the-night" festival that will include an outdoor party.

Hewlett-Packard conducted feasibility studies on placing spies in news bureaus of two publications as part of an investigation into leaks from its board, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. Hewlett-Packard could not immediately be reached for comment. It is not clear whether the plan described in the documents was ever acted upon.

Lenovo Group is upping the performance of its Lenovo 3000-brand computers. The company has updated its Lenovo 3000 N100 notebook PC line with Intel’s dual-core Core 2 Duo processor. The company is also expected to add dual-core processors to its Lenovo 3000 desktop line. The new processors, along with other component upgrades, are designed to increase the performance of Lenovo’s relatively new Lenovo 3000 PC line, which the company hatched in February 2006 in an effort to more aggressively target SMBs.

IBM is planning to use a combination of services and incentives to entice customers currently using rival blade servers onto its BladeCenter platform. IBM’s Blade Migration Center is designed to steal away business from Hewlett-Packard and Dell and give IBM a greater lead in the fastest-growing segment of the server space, a space that analyst firm IDC is predicting to swell from $2.2 billion in 2005 to $10 billion in 2010.

Businesses must gain an understanding of computer forensics if they are to keep pace with the growing level of internal security threats, experts say. Bruce Nikkel, head of the IT investigation and forensics department at UBS, said areas such as the military and law enforcement have been using forensics for some time, but he urged big business to get up to speed and understand the challenges. Nikkel’s advice, offered at a Gartner security summit in London this week, coincides with a strong warning from the analyst house about the growing threat from within organizations.

A new, independent research report named IBM as a strong performer in service oriented architecture. The Forrester Wave: North American SOA Integration, Q3 2006, September 2006 examined IBM Global Services’ current SOA offerings, SOA strategy and market presence. Forrester found that "Given its size and reach, IBM is the leader in development of SOA intellectual property. Highlighted by its recent acquisition of Webify coupled with firmwide SOA investment of $1 billion, IBM will leverage cutting-edge R&D, leading to quicker SOA projects and reusable SOA assets for its clients. IBM feels that SOA will help align to CEOs’ focus on globalization, business innovation and flexibility."

A new AOL instant-messaging worm is making the rounds, carrying a malicious payload disguised as a JPEG, according to security researchers. The worm provides a path for rootkits and Trojan horses to propagate on the computers of those listed on the user’s buddy list, according to an advisory by FaceTime Security Labs. The W32.pipeline worm is one of a growing number of instant-messaging threats on the Internet.

More than 50 percent of CIOs plan on spending more on technology in 2007 than in 2006, according to a survey released by the Society for Information Management on Sept. 18. To be specific, 51.8 percent of those surveyed said 2007 IT budgets would be higher than 2006 IT budgets, with 32.8 percent expecting flat budgets.

Toshiba is recalling 340,000 laptop batteries worldwide made by Sony, the latest in a series of problems for the company. While the latest battery problem causes the laptops to sometimes run out of power, no injuries or other accidents have been reported. The defect is not directly related to the problem behind last month’s recall of Sony batteries by Dell Inc. and Apple Computer Inc., which cited concerns that the batteries could overheat and catch fire.