Why SCO has no case

"IT directors shouldn't worry about SCO Group's latest sallies in its legal war on Linux vendors IBM Corp. and Novell Inc., says attorney Thomas Carey. It's just more posturing, or as Shakespeare said, a tale "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Liable For Your Employee's Porn Addiction??!

With specific reference to our own Films and Publications Act (Amended), employers in South Africa should be aware of similar actions in South Africa - see below, information received from the USA:
Employers' monitoring of their employees' online activity is nothing new. And neither is reprimanding an employee for visiting pornography websites at the office. But thanks to a recent court decision, employers may now have a legal obligation to halt such activity by employees, or they could be liable if that activity "result[s] in harm to innocent third parties." On December 27, in Doe v. XYC Corp., the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, ruled that "an employer who is on notice that one of its employees is using a workplace computer to access pornography, possibly child pornography, has a duty to investigate the employee's activities and to take prompt and effective action to stop the unauthorized activity." The court held that no privacy interest of the employee stood in the way of this duty. Although the ruling has serious implications for any company that offers Internet service in the workplace, it may be of special interest to Internet service providers -- who already have their own child pornography notification obligations under 42 U.S.C. § 13032, and who may come across illegal activity not only on the part of their employees but also on the part of their subscribers. And the court's reasoning could extend beyond pornography to any illegal or harmful conduct engaged in by employees from their work computers.

U.S. Government Pushes Banks to Tighten up Online

E-Commerce Times: The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, a federal agency that includes the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the National Credit Union Administration, and oversees banking regulations in the U.S., issued guidelines in late 2005 calling for online banks to implement two-factor identity authentication. Now the agency has announced that it will begin evaluating banks for compliance with the guidelines later this year. The guidelines were issued because the FFIEC felt that single-factor authentication is not secure enough for online banking applications.

Interesting numbers!!

15 percent
Proportion of IT budgets to be allocated toward compliance projects in 2006, up from less than 5 percent in 2004, according to Gartner projections.Source: CRN
1,031
Number of companies restating their earnings in 2005 as of October, as compared to 650 for all of 2004 and 270 for all of 2001.Source: International Herald Tribune
90 percent
Proportion of companies that go under within two years of losing data, according to research firm Baroudi Bloor International.Source: Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal

Overhaul of GPL set for public release

A major revamp of the General Public License is scheduled for public release next week, a move that's expected to kick off a long and vocal debate over the key foundation of open-source programming.