When your backup fails go to your secondary backup. When your secondary backup fails, cry. It is rare but it happens. Just when you think you have everything covered shit happens. Some people can go years without backing up and have no problems. While you on the other hand have gone through 5 drives in 5 years. Bad luck? Maybe. Bad habits? Definitely. Time for online storage? Start looking. Because when your multiple backups start failing you've got big problems.

 
 

IBM Corp. said Thursday it has agreed to acquire privately held storage software company FilesX to enhance its data recovery offerings for remote offices.

Financial terms were not disclosed. IBM said the acquisition is expected to close "shortly."

FilesX specializes in data protection and recovery of applications and servers running on Microsoft Windows.

The company is based in Newton, Mass., and Haifa, Israel. FilesX has more than 100 customers in the U.S. and Israel. BusinessWeek

 
 

According to alerts released Wednesday by VeriSign Inc.'s iDefense, the ActiveX control "SymAData.dll" sports two vulnerabilities that could be used "to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the currently logged in user" by attackers able to entice victims to malicious Web sites.

Symantec confirmed the vulnerabilities Wednesday in its own advisory, and said the buggy control has shipped with Windows versions of Norton AntiVirus 2006-2008, Norton Internet Security 2006-2008, Norton SystemWorks 2006-2008 and Norton 360 version 1.0. (computerworld)

 
 

Enterprises are holding onto IE 6 and giving Firefox some love. IE 6 usage is going to be a problem for Web developers, because of the browser's weak standards support. If there were a Web equivalent to Frankenstein's monster, IE 6 could be it.

The monster is driving away customers. Enterprise IE adoption dropped from 88.7 percent to 78.7 percent in 2007 with gains mainly going to Firefox, according to a new report. Forrester published the data on March 27, but only released it publicly today. Forrester surveyed a whopping 50,000 users at over 2,300 large to very large enterprises throughout 2007.

IE 7 and Firefox 2 were released around the same time. Firefox's overall enterprise adoption nearly doubled, to 18 percent, in 2007. IE 7's share climbed from about 10 percent to near 30 percent during the same time frame. (link)

 
 

Microsoft has picked up a powerful new online-privacy technology that it says it wants to share ... eventually.

In a move that could extend its already substantial presence in the realm of identity access and management, the software giant recently announced it had acquired the patents to the U-Prove technology developed by cryptographer Stefan Brands and his colleagues at the Montreal startup, Credentica.

Implemented properly, the U-Prove algorithms could allow users to exercise absolute control over the information they release online; guarantee that whatever information they did release would not linger indefinitely; and make it impossible to hack, link or trace that information back to them. (link)