IT chief blamed for cyber woes

In response to reports of persistent cyber security flaws at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a top congressional Democrat has questioned whether the agency's chief information officer deserves to keep his job, reports News.com.

The department charged with safeguarding the security of the nation's computer systems has not been setting a good example and CIO Scott Charbo has not shown he is serious about fixing its vulnerabilities, said Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee.

"How can we ask the private sector to better train employees and implement more consistent access controls when DHS allows employees to send classified e-mails over unclassified networks and contractors to attach unapproved laptops to the network?" Thompson asked.

Nvidia has introduced the Tesla line of processors, which it bills as making high-density parallel processing capabilities available in workstation computers, says PCWorld.com.

The Tesla graphics processing unit features 128 parallel processors and delivers up to 518 gigaflops of parallel computation. A gigaflop refers to the processing of a billion floating point operations per second.

Nvidia envisions the Tesla being used in high-performance computing environments such as geosciences, molecular biology or medical diagnostics.

Six Asian mobile-phone operators, including LG Telecom and Malaysia's Maxis Communications, will use Yahoo's search software as part of its efforts to boost advertising sales, reports Tapei Times.

Taiwan Mobile, Idea Cellular, PT Telekomunikasi Selular and Globe Telecom will also use the OneSearch software. Yahoo did not disclose financial details.

Yahoo, seeking to narrow the gap with Google, targets companies that want to promote products and services to phone subscribers, tapping a market that is growing faster than PCs. Mobile phones outsold PCs last year by more than four to one, said Gartner.

Social networking site MySpace officially launched a beta version of its MySpaceIM instant messaging client. The company notes it began rolling out the software a year ago, and it has been spreading virally ever since, to the point where 17 million MySpace users have already given it a shot, says Digital Trends.

"This is a product with personality," said MySpace president and co-founder Tom Anderson. "MySpaceIM was born out of user feedback and we've spent the last year listening to our community and tweaking it to match their needs. MySpace will continue to build an open, unique feature set that is as creative and expressive as our users."

MySpaceIM provides one-click access to a user's MySpace friends' profiles, and pops up instant alerts to comments, requests and messages sent to a user's MySpace account.