Surge in oil prices hits IT

The threat of oil costing $200 a barrel could mean firms dumping the cost of power on IT, forcing a huge rise in the cost of IT operations, says Computing.co.uk. The dramatic rise in oil prices is causing a rethink of IT strategies, as energy costs look set to drive the IT agenda.

Chief information officers (CIOs) face being charged for data centre services by kilowatt hours, and industry attempts to curb energy use in data centres are being seriously questioned.

Energy savings through technologies, such as virtualisation, are improving performance, but can be offset by greater cooling needed for consolidated servers.

Sweden's Parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic, says BBC.

The country's intelligence bureau will be able to scan international calls, faxes and e-mails. The measure was passed by a narrow majority after a heated debate in the Stockholm Parliament.

Critics say it threatens civil liberties and represents Europe's most far-reaching eavesdropping plan.

Security appliances from Cisco can crash when handling Jumbo Ethernet frames, the networking giant warned on Wednesday, reports The Register.

Cisco has published a software patch designed to address a denial of service vulnerability in its Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) appliances. IPS systems are designed to block common hacker attacks and exploits. But a bug in the devices meant that "kernel panic", leading to a crash, might be induced when processing Jumbo Ethernet packets.

Recovery in these cases would involve resetting the devices using a power cycle. In the meantime, network traffic would be cut off except in the case of Cisco's 4260 and 4270 IPS platforms, which have the option to allow traffic to bypass devices in the event of a system failure.

A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music, says BBC.

The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.

The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers. The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.

For more than two years, executives and other senior employees have been leaving Yahoo at a steady, persistent trickle, reports New York Times.

The trickle has turned into a flood. In a matter of days after Yahoo's announcement last week that merger talks with Microsoft had ended and that the company had instead chosen to sign a search advertising partnership with its top rival, Google, three executive vice-presidents, two senior vice-presidents and handful of other well-regarded employees have announced their intention to leave.

The precipitous exodus is hollowing out Yahoo's senior management ranks. It is also raising new questions about the future of the company and its top executives. Analyst say that the departures suggest that Jerry Yang, the chief executive, and Susan Decker, the president, are increasingly isolated.