Chris Conrath

During a recent visit to Toronto for the Can>Win 2004 conference, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer talked about the challenges facing Microsoft, especially in the developing world where the market opportunities are the biggest, but so too are the challenges. .

While up in Toronto recently speaking at the third annual Canadian Forum on IT security and Governance, Silverstone had an emergency call from his tech people about the 120,000 copies of the Bagle and Mydoom (latest versions) blended threats that hit the university's systems.

Often viewed as an unavoidable cost of doing business, and with little overall corporate strategy dictating its use, printing is increasingly becoming a target of corporate cost cutters.

Frustration over the latest Microsoft Corp. vulnerability announced late last month is failing to wane as IT departments face the ongoing and daunting task of patching millions of machines worldwide.

Risk reduction or mitigation is often thought of as a science of number crunching and probabilities. But it is much closer to an art, albeit one which is not afraid of the world of statistics.

Not that anybody has ever accused virus writers of being the epitome of maturity, but the war, if it can be called that, between the creators of NetSky and Bagle has gotten personal

Microsoft Corp. has gone on the warpath trying to convince customers it is safer and, more importantly, cheaper to choose Windows over Linux. In fact it has been the basis of a recent ad campaign. So it is of little surprise that the subject came up during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Lawyers and the law tend to exist only in the background in the world of IT. In fact, they mostly pop into the picture around contract signing time. But the events of the past few weeks have prompted me to take a closer look at the increasing role being played by the legal profession in the IT world.