A Boeing Co. laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of 382,000 workers and retirees has been stolen, putting the employees at risk for identity theft and credit-card fraud.

The theft, which was confirmed Tuesday, was the third such incident at Boeing in just over a year.

Files on the computer also contained home addresses, phone numbers and birth dates. Some of the files listed salary information.

Source: AP

A former UBS PaineWebber systems administrator was sentenced Wednesday to eight years and one month in prison for attempting to profit by detonating a “logic bomb” program that prosecutors said caused millions of dollars in damage to the brokerage’s computer network in 2002.

Roger Duronio also was ordered to pay $3.1 million in restitution to his former employer, now known as UBS Financial Services Inc., part of the Swiss banking company UBS AG.

Source: AP

Time Warner Inc.’s AOL said on Wednesday it has completed the bulk of a plan to reduce its work force by 5,000 employees, or 26 percent, as part of a wholesale restructuring of the online unit’s business model.

AOL declined to give details on where the job cuts were made or how many are in the current round.

AOL said in early August that its global work force of 19,000 would shrink by 5,000 employees from layoffs and transfers of workers to new companies. At the time, it employed about 3,000 people in Europe, where it has now sold off most of its Internet access businesses. It is unclear how many employees in Europe were retained by the company.

Source: Reuters

Mozilla on Tuesday released the first beta of Thunderbird 2.0, the open-source developer’s next-generation e-mail client. It also pushed back the rollout of a Firefox security update by nearly a week.

Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1 sports a revamped visual design, new message tags to organize mail, browser-like back and forward navigation, and improved support for extensions. It also boasts improvements in message filing, offline use, and saved searches.

Source: InformationWeek

Google Inc has open-sourced its tool set for building Web applications, the Google Web Toolkit.

According to a notice issued by Chris Ulbrich, a spokesperson for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, the company has open-sourced the GWT 1.3 release candidate. Previous versions of the GWT were only partly open-sourced, Ulbrich said.

In a Dec. 12 blog post, Bruce Johnson, technical lead for GWT at Google, said, “Today is quite a milestone for Google Web Toolkit: with the GWT 1.3 Release Candidate, our team is very happy to announce that all of GWT is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.”

Source: eWeek

Microsoft’s use of code-scrambling diversity to secure Windows Vista is getting crucial support from OEM partners.

The Redmond, Wash. software giant has convinced major U.S. computer makers—including Dell, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard—to make default changes at the BIOS level to allow a new Vista security feature called ALSR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to work properly.

ASLR, which is used to randomly arrange the positions of key data areas to block hackers from predicting target addresses, is meant to make Windows Vista more resilient to virus and worm attacks.

However, for randomization to be effective, DEP/NX (Data Execution Prevention/No eXecute) must be enabled by default.

During a three-day conference to in November 2006, Microsoft security program manager Michael Howard said he pleaded with OEMs to enable DEP/NX in the BIOS by default on all their shipping PCs in time for Windows Vista.

Source: eWeek

Microsoft on Wednesday plans to take the wraps off its first commercial operating system for robots, with hopes of paving the way for a broader robotics industry and taking a central role in its development.

The technology, called Microsoft Robotics Studio, is a Windows-based software platform designed to make it relatively simple to program robots–real or simulated. Compatible with several different pieces of hardware, like iRobot’s Roomba or LEGO Mindstorms NXT “tribot,” the software lets enterprising gadget hounds command a device to communicate, send alerts or perform scheduled tasks.

The software is free for hobbyists or researchers, but companies aiming to profit from its use must license a commercial version for $399.

Source: News.com

Skype, which helped make free PC-to-PC calling a global phenomenon, will announce Wednesday a $29.95-a-year service offering unlimited calls to wireless and traditional landline phones.

Skype’s Unlimited Calling subscription moves the company toward the mainstream of phone services and poses a significant challenge on price to many VoIP services - short for Voice over Internet Protocol - that can cost $300 to $400 per year.

Previously, Skype users had to prepay for Skype credits to make such calls.

Source: Yahoo