IBM has made Firefox the company’s default Web browser. According to IBM’s vice president of Linux and open source software, company-wide Firefox adoption will accelerate IBM’s shift to cloud computing.

Via: ars technica

A joint study conducted by TELUS and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto surveyed more than 600 Canadian IT security professionals on Canadian IT security practices this year.

The economic downturn has increased the risk organizations:

“The threat environment worsens because when the economy goes into a downturn, job losses mount, and as people leave the organization many often take data with them,” Mr. Hejazi said.

About 33 per cent of reported security breaches this year came from within companies, and unauthorized access by employees represented the fastest-growing threat area, according to TELUS Security Labs managing director and study co-author Alan LeFort.

Last year, about 17 per cent of Canadian organizations reported so-called “insider breaches.” This year, that number has more than doubled to 36 per cent.

The complete article can be read at The Globe and Mail

Vancouver city council has endorsed the principles of making its data open and accessible to everyone where possible, adopting open standards for that data and considering open source software when replacing existing applications.

More details on the announcement available at the Straight

Techworld reports the following:

The world’s six largest computer drive makers have published the final specifications for a single, full-disk encryption standard that can be used across all hard disk drives, solid state drives (SSD) and encryption key management applications.

Read the full article at Techworld.

Technical problems with the license management servers at SonicWall Inc. created havoc last week for users of the company’s firewall and e-mail security products, leaving many companies temporarily unprotected against spam, phishing and malware threats.

The problems resulted in affected enterprise users of the SonicWALL UTM Firewall, Email Security, Content Security appliances temporarily having their content filter, intrusion prevention and antivirus protection disabled due to the reset of license keys that were treated as invalid.

More details on the matter can be read at the Register

Microsoft today released a new Games for Windows Live update, which improves the interface. A separate update will arrive in two to three weeks, adding support for video, demos, and DLC downloads through a Marketplace application.

Microsoft has definite plans to distribute full PC titles through its Marketplace application in the future.

Via: CrunchGear

Steam Cloud support, which was announced last May, will be released in tangent with Valve’s co-op zombie shooter Left 4 Dead demo later this week. Steam Cloud is expected to be compatible with all other Valve Steam releases (including the back catalog) after receiving support updates. Valve has also been providing other developers with the tools to make their own titles compatible free of charge.

Steam Cloud support is seamless, meaning any changes to a users game configuration such as graphics options and key settings, and best of all, save games, will propagate to the Cloud automatically. Upon logging into your Steam account from another PC, these settings will be synchronized down from the Cloud and automatically loaded by the game. Any changes to the configuration on this second machine are then synced to the Cloud for future sessions.

The simplicity from the perspective of the user of this new capability is quite brilliant.

A national cyber-security strategy that will seek to protect key infrastructure as well as Canadians’ identities is on the way , an RCMP executive says.

Details of the strategy — a partnership between the public and private sectors — will emerge over the next few months, said David Black, manager of the RCMP’s cyber infrastructure protection section. The plan is being put together by Public Safety Canada with input from telecommunications and technology companies such as Bell Canada Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Source: CBC

In a survey conducted by Net Applications on 40,000 sites, the results show that more than 8% of computers accessing the web were using Apple Macs. These numbers are only indicative of Macs that are used to access the internet. 8% may seem like a small number, but consider that the current estimated internet usage statistics pin a number around 1463632361 users.  That places Macs used to access the internet around 117090588 machines.

These numbers only highlight the importance of testing Apple Mac as a platform against your external facing websites.

Transmeta is actively seeking a buyer, having given up the chip game entirely in favor of lucrative patent licensing deals. Considering that AMD owns a $7.5M chunk of stock and most of Transmeta’s tech is already licensed out to NVIDIA and Intel, those seem like they’d be likely suitors.

More at C-NET.