HP sued by own sales reps

IT vendors are often not much better than their customers when it comes to doing information technology, and sometimes, they are worse. This appears to be the case with the Omega sales force commission tracking system used by Hewlett-Packard, which has screwed up commissions so badly that three former employees of the company have taken HP to court, says The Register.

The Wall Street Journal last week broke the story about the Omega commission calculation system not paying employees correctly. Omega is a legacy commission system that was created by minicomputer maker Digital Equipment.

It was adopted and used by Compaq when the PC and server maker ate DEC in 1998. Like many legacy applications, Omega managed to survive another decade even as HP bought Compaq in 2002, but maybe it is time to get a different system for the people who are selling servers, storage and systems software at HP.

According to the annual report from UK interception of communications commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy, police and other public officials requested information on phone calls and e-mails an average of 1 381 times a day last year, says Computing.co.uk.

A total of 504 073 surveillance requests to phone and Internet companies were made in 2008 under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a 44% rise in requests over the past two years.

The requests were for data about the communications - such as sender, recipient or time - rather than the content of the messages themselves.

The pro-Georgian blogger who was the target of attacks that shut down micro-blogging Web site Twitter last week has called on Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to track down the culprits, reports The Register.

The well-known blogger, who goes by the name Cyxymu, has said the attacks - which also struck Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube - were carried out by people loyal to Russia who wanted to silence posts criticising that country's invasion into Georgia last year.

He has called on Medvedev to investigate the denial-of-service attacks and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Rival environmental groups are lining up supporters to try to take control of a new Internet domain aimed at green groups, reports the BBC.

At least two consortiums are known to be preparing bids to control .eco.

In March, former US vice-president Al Gore backed a bid by the California group Dot Eco to operate the proposed "top level domain".

One bank wants to let customers deposit cheques immediately, through their phones, reports CNet.

USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the cheque deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the cheque with the phone's camera.

"We're essentially taking an image of the cheque, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other cheque would," says Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice-president.