IBM says it is the No. 1 technology employer in the U.S. and the world, but as time moves on it may be harder to tell just what is happening to its domestic workforce.

Chip giant Intel won first place in a ranking of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs), in which the researcher, DRAMeXchange Technology, pilloried the industry over the wide disparity of quality among the storage devices.

A Canadian interface design firm accused Mozilla of stealing user interface (UI) elements for a development tool in the browser maker's Jetpack project, which aims to simplify add-on making.

Google will begin on Thursday a public test of a Blogger layout customization tool that the company says significantly broadens publishers' ability to modify the look of their blogs.

The world is one step closer to holding the Apple iPad in its shaking hands: consumers can pre-order iPads on the Apple Website starting today, Friday, March 12, at 8:30 a.m. EST.

At the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week, security vendors pitched their next-generation of security products, promising to protect customers from security threats in the cloud and on mobile devices. But what went largely unsaid was that the industry has failed to protect paying customers from some of today's most pernicious threats.

Intel invested an undisclosed amount in social media incubator Betaworks to gain insight into real-time user behavior on social networks, the chip maker said on Thursday. The investment could help Intel develop better hardware for mobile devices or servers that either access or provide real-time social media services, said Mike Buckley, managing director of Intel Capital. Buckley declined to comment on how much Intel invested in Betaworks.

Microsoft is offering financial enticements to customers of on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor NetSuite to switch over to Microsoft's Dynamics family of business applications. NetSuite customers will be credited up to $850 for each user who converts to Dynamics GP, NAV, or SL. The promotion is in effect until June 25 and available to customers in the U.S.

$200 tablet PCs have been something of a pipe dream. There was the Crunchpad, which was supposed to be $200, but that didn't last very long, coming out as the $400 Joo Joo.

The Public Interest Registry will add an extra layer of security known as DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to the .org domain in June -- a move that will protect millions of non-profit organizations and their donors from hacking attacks known as cache poisoning.

Hyped as the router that would 'change forever the face of the Internet', Cisco has launched its new CRS-3 system as the box it predicts will stream video into the Net's darkest recesses.

Exploit code for the unpatched bug in Internet Explorer was published on the Web yesterday, a step security pros said earlier would be the precursor to widespread attacks.

Opera has released a beta version of its Mini 5 Web browser for Android-based smartphones, the company said on Thursday. Just like the versions of the beta for other phones, Opera Mini 5 for Android beta compresses data by up to 90 percent before sending content to the phone to speed up browsing over low-bandwidth data connections, according to the Norwegian browser company.

The U.S. Federal Court of Appeals has once again upheld a jury's verdict that Microsoft willfully infringed on patents awarded to i4i.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is no longer the world's richest man according to the annual Forbes magazine list released Tuesday, but it's not like he's going to have to go crawling back for his old job either.

Motorola will start loading Microsoft's Bing search and map services onto its Android smartphones in China, bringing more non-Google services to the phones amid a row between Google and China.

Macs in the enterprise aren't just cheaper to manage -- they're a lot cheaper, according to a new survey released today by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. Keep in mind that Enterprise Desktop Alliance is a group of software developers who've bandied together to deploy and manage Macs in the enterprise. The group surveyed 260 IT administrators in large U.S. companies with both Macs and PCs who are involved in some degree with IT cost calculations.

By almost any measure, Cisco Systems is the biggest fish in the networking pond. Thanks to more than 130 acquisitions, a brisk pace of internal development, and a much-discussed new organizational structure that the company is using to attack a slew of new markets, Cisco's reach extends from the consumer to the enterprise and deep into service provider networks. The company offers everything from personal video cameras to high-end telepresence systems to set-top video boxes to, lately, servers for the data center, in addition to more traditional network gear like routers and switches.

CA said Wednesday it has signed a deal to buy IT performance monitoring vendor Nimsoft for $350 million. The acquisition, which is scheduled to close this month, will strengthen CA's hand in IT management software for what it calls "emerging enterprises," or companies with annual revenues between $300 million and $2 billion, and for managed service providers.

Microsoft in recent months has slowly boosted its share of the search business, but still remains far behind a so-far unbeatable foe in its battle with Google. Hitwise, an online traffic monitor, today reported that Google last month remained firmly at the head of the search pack while its rival's well regarded Microsoft Bing product gradually picks up a little traction.

For high-tech workers, it pays to be certified, according to research conducted by Dice Learning that shows 10 IT certifications stand out for delivering higher salaries.

The Chinese government is likely behind recent cyberattacks on U.S. government Web sites and on U.S. companies in an apparent effort to quash criticism of the government there, an expert on U.S. and Chinese relations said Wednesday.

Users of Adobe PDF Reader should check they are running the latest version of the software after the discovery of an exploit that takes advantage of a serious flaw patched only three weeks ago.

With the iPad presale beginning in just a few days, and the clock ticking down to the much-anticipated Apple tablet finally hitting the streets, HP launched a renewed campaign for its Slate tablet PC debuted at the 2010 CES by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Citrix Systems has launched version 6 of XenApp, its platform for centralized application delivery that features centralized management and access to Windows applications from Android-based smartphones and Apple computers, the company said on Wednesday.

Some BlackBerry users are complaining of an inability to use data services for two days in a row. It appears that the issue could be related to two separate problems. While some users seemed to be back in business late Tuesday, others were still having problems.

Microsoft fixed eight flaws in Windows and Office Tuesday, but passed on patching one Windows component because it cannot be automatically updated.

Apple's agreement with iPhone developers contains several "troubling" clauses that paint the company as a "jealous and arbitrary feudal lord," the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said yesterday. The nonprofit digital rights advocacy group on Tuesday published a January 2010 version of the iPhone Developer License Agreement obtained from NASA through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The launch of Apple's iPad will pave the way for a slew of rival products this year, an Arm executive said Wednesday, predicting over 50 tablet PC devices will be launched globally.

Don't expect Jonathan Schwartz to go quietly.

Twitter has launched a new link-screening service aimed at preventing phishing and other malicious attacks against users of the popular microblogging service. Part of the new service is a new Twitter tool to shorten URLs, so users will see some links in email notifications and direct messages from other users written as twt.tl, Twitter said in a blog post.

Jim Thomas said no to Windows Vista -- but Windows 7 is an entirely different matter. Thomas, CIO at Pella, says his IT team began beta testing Vista's successor a year ago as an upgrade path from Windows XP. By October, just two months after Windows 7 launched, the Pella, Iowa-based window and door manufacturer had 225 Windows 7 clients up and running -- and the feedback from both IT staff and users has been generally positive.

Google launched on Tuesday evening Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap and Zoho.

number of former Sun Microsystems employees who worked on Drizzle, an offshoot of the MySQL open-source database, have ended up at cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace, where they will continue their efforts, developer Jay Pipes wrote in a blog post Monday.

Sun's chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has left the company following its acquisition by Oracle, the executive announced in his blog Tuesday. "Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean)," Phipps wrote. "I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer."

Sentilla has released an update to its data center energy management tool, which lets IT and facilities staff track the energy usage of servers and other equipment. The latest version is a software-only product that adds a chargeback capability, allowing companies to bill individual business units for the energy they use.

This just in from VMware: "Fling is defined as 'a brief casual relationship.'" That text actually appears on a site VMware created to share internal engineering projects -- software code that is interesting but not yet ready for VMware's flagship virtualization products.

When Australian firm WesTrac needed to expand its data center capacity quickly, the company bought the equivalent of a Band-Aid for its server needs: A containerized data center. The company, which supplies Caterpillar brand heavy-machinery to Australian customers and others, found itself with too little data center to meet the needs of its latest IT project. Because of space issues, WesTrac could not expand its current facility.

Developers of the Google-backed Android mobile application platform have released revision 3 of Android NDK (Native Development Kit), which complements Android SDK by enabling developers to build performance-critical portions of an application in native code. Release of NDK r3 was noted in a posting on the Android Developer Blog on Monday.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. "The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate," Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said during a webcast Tuesday morning announcing the product.[ Stay ahead of the key tech business news with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: First Look newsletter. ]

If the public wants online privacy it had better fight now for laws to protect it because businesses won't and individuals don't have the clout, security expert Bruce Schneier told RSA Conference. Facebook's New Privacy Settings: 5 Things You Should Know

EMC today announced an upgrade to the management software on its Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) arrays that will allow administrators to apply deduplication, thin provisioning and business continuity tools to data stored in VMware environments.

EMC today announced an upgrade to the management software on its Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) arrays that will allow administrators to apply deduplication, thin provisioning and business continuity tools to data stored in VMware environments.

Chip giant Intel, a major backer of the movement to provide mobile WiMax wireless broadband to Internet users around the world, expects the next major release of the technology to be deployed starting in 2012, an executive said Tuesday. "Standards work will be completed by the end of this year," said Rama Shukla, a vice president and director of the WiMax program office at Intel, during a news conference in Taipei.

Opera Software will soon patch a vulnerability in its Web browser that could allow an attacker to run malicious software on a Windows computer. The problem affects Opera browser version 10.50 running on Windows and possibly others, according to an advisory from Danish security company Secunia said.

IT employment grew by 0.37 percent, or 14,000 jobs, in February, one of the strongest month-to-month gains since 2008, according to the TechServe Alliance, an IT services industry group that analyzes U.S. Labor Department unemployment data. In January, IT employment increased by 12,900 jobs, TechServe Alliance reported.

Data integration specialist Cast Iron Systems is about to release a new offering aimed at both on-premises and cloud-based scenarios. Cast Iron OmniConnect, to be available Tuesday, represents an evolution of the vendor's existing IaaS (integration as a service) and on-premises offerings. It is available in on-demand form, as an on-premises or hosted virtual appliance, or as a hardware appliance.

Even though Microsoft has dropped a plan to wait nearly two years after Windows 7's launch to issue a first service pack, it won't deliver the update before the fourth quarter of this year, a site that has accurately predicted past Windows timetables said today. Microsoft would be smart to reconsider and delay a service pack as long as possible, one analyst countered.

The technical services group of Capgemini has traditionally helped companies with system integration, but cloud computing is changing that. The company is increasingly assembling lots of different software-as-a-service applications, a phenomenon that has led Capgemini to create a new business unit.

The Eclipse Foundation on Monday is announcing a restructuring of its Mylyn task-focused interface project, adding subprojects for several functions.