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Opposition to a new security database is gaining momentum in France as people return to work after a summer break during which the government authorized the state to store personal information on people as young as 13. The decree creating the "Edvige" electronic database appeared in the official gazette on July 1, when the country was winding down for the summer, but news of its content has been gradually filtering out and is now stirring fierce criticism. (link)

Netbooks—tiny, lightweight subnotebooks—may one day be subsidized by mobile carriers in order to sell them alongside high-speed 3G service. That's what Dell CEO Michael Dell thinks, anyway, according to his comments at the Citigroup Technology Conference yesterday.

Dell's speculation came on the eve of the company's launch of the Inspiron Mini 9 (also known as the Inspiron 910), a netbook that is expected to cost as low as $299 and compete with the likes of Eee PC . At the Citigroup conference, Dell said that, while netbooks are good first PCs for those in emerging markets, he expects netbooks to be a second or third computer in more developed economies like the US." (Netbooks are) a market expansion," said Dell according to ZDNet. "We won't see a lot of people trading down 15 inch notebooks for 9 inch notebooks." (link)

Buying faster switches might not be the only way to amp up performance across data center networks, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, who this week proposed a network architecture that would enable commodity Ethernet switches to deliver better performance at a lower cost than their 10 Gigabit Ethernet counterparts.

Amin Vahdat, computer science professor at UC San Diego, presented research findings at SIGCOMM 2008 in Seattle that laid out how the principles behind clustered computing could be applied to network architecture to improve scalability and performance at reduced costs. (link)

No matter which operating system is currently installed on your computer, the number one concern is always the persistent necessity to keep all data secure. If you are among those who chose to use Vista on their PCs and laptops, like the rest of us, you are probably experiencing difficulties in finding effective system utilities that can optimize your work with the operating system. And it just looks like the time is right for all Windows Vista users to start looking for the solution that would allow them to effectively backup Windows Mail.

So what do you do if you haven’t been using a backup plan and your system crashes or a virus wipes out your files? You will probably have to call in the pros at this time. There are many companies that specialize in recovering data from any type of media for just about any type of system failure. Some of the companies also specialize in recovering certain types of files that have been corrupted. For example, if you have a corrupted Microsoft Excel file, look for a company that specifies expertise with that type of file.

Spam (and the malware it contains) may be a tremendous concern to most IT companies, but information from a new Trend Micro survey suggests that it has become more of a managed concern, and is being superseded as a top priority threat by another issue: data leaks. While they may or may not be intentional, data leaks have the potential to expose thousands or even millions of records to theft.

Despite growing concerns over data security, Trend Micro reports that only some 46 percent of companies even have leak prevention strategies in place. That's surprisingly few, given the string of high-profile data losses in the past 12 months. Some of these incidents might seem to focus more on device loss and less on data leaks, but in many incidents, the occurrence of one automatically results in the other. If the FBI loses 160 laptops, it has effectively leaked all of the data they collectively contain into the public domain. (link)

A new Texas law requires every computer repair technician to obtain a private investigator's license, according to a lawsuit filed in Austin. Violators can face a $4,000 fine and one year in jail, as well as a $10,000 civil penalty.

Unlicensed computer shops will have to close down until they obtain a private investigator's license.

A private investigator's license can be obtained by acquiring a criminal justice degree or by getting a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator.

According to the Institute for Justice, an Austin-based non-profit law firm, the new law also impacts consumers. Consumers who knowingly take computers to an unlicensed company for repair can face the same penalties. (link)

A study released Monday by the privacy-focused Ponemon Institute and funded by e-mail marketing firm Strongmail reveals a disturbing disconnect in companies between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.

In response to a survey answered by 500 privacy and 900 marketing executives in industries ranging from health care to financial services, more than a third of marketing execs said they don't place any limits on the data they share with third parties, such as e-mail marketing agencies or online advertisers. By contrast, 75% of privacy officers believe that their companies limit the sharing of customer data.
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Today, data center experts are no longer taken for granted. The torrid growth in data centers to keep pace with the demands of Internet-era computing, their immense need for electricity and their inefficient use of that energy pose environmental, energy and economic challenges, experts say.

That means people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. Their status is growing, as are their salaries — climbing more than 20 percent in the last two years into six figures for experienced engineers.

“The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use,” said Jonathan G. Koomey, a consulting professor of environmental engineering at Stanford. “So that explains why these data center people, who haven’t gotten a lot of glory in their careers, are in the spotlight now.” (link)

Now more than ever, it's important that Windows users ensure their machines are safe from hackers. A dangerous new strain of malicious software that holds the victim's computers files for ransom has been unleashed, and Kaspersky Lab is warning that security researchers have yet to crack the encryption key.

The malware in this case is the latest version of Gpcode, a nasty piece of "ransomware" that scrambles all of the victim's data files with an encryption key known only to the attacker(s). Victims are told via a pop-up message that they need to purchase a special decryption program to regain access to their data.

Kaspersky and other anti-virus companies have previously unraveled the secret encryption key for all previous versions of Gpcode, but this time, the malware author apparently has learned from his previous mistakes. Now, the Gpcode author is encrypting victim files with an extremely strong 1,024-bit RSA encryption key. (link)