Mozilla security chief Snyder steps down

In today's podcast: Mozilla security chief Snyder steps down; Yahoo begins promised round of layoffs; and Apple registers Grand Central trademark.

Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes!

Window Snyder, the head of security at Mozilla Corp., will resign her position at the end of the year, she said in a blog post Wednesday. Snyder, who has the kooky job title of "chief security something-or-other," is in charge of improving security in the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla projects. She isn't yet saying publicly what she plans to do next. A source familiar with her plans said she is going to work at a start-up company. Snyder joined Mozilla in September 2006 from Microsoft, where she was a security strategist and worked on Microsoft's security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2 update.

As a bookend to a tumultuous year, Yahoo has begun handing out pink slips to about 1,500 employees, acting on an earlier announcement that it would cut at least 10 percent of its staff before year's end. The "at least" part of the announcement had left open the question of how many people would be let go, but Yahoo confirmed Wednesday that it will be a 10 percent reduction of its about 15,000 employees. The staff reduction is part of a plan intended to cut more than US$400 million in costs on an annualized basis.

Apple has registered Grand Central as a trademark. Grand Central is the name given to a technique used by Apple's forthcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard to handle multiple processor cores. As users gradually migrate from computers with a single powerful computing core to many cores, managing work across those resources becomes far more important, and that's exactly what Grand Central is intended to improve. Also included in its responsibilities is support for OpenCL. OpenCL is a technology that allows general computing tasks to leverage the power in today's graphics chips.

A subsidiary of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has started the hostile takeover bid for security vendor Certicom that it disclosed plans for last week. RIM said Wednesday the subsidiary filed a circular on the bid and made formal announcements in two Canadian newspapers. Both RIM and Certicom are based in Ontario. Security is a strong point for the BlackBerry system, in which all e-mail goes through RIM's network operations center and is encrypted for transit over wireless networks. But BlackBerry devices are not certified for the highest levels of government security, a fact that has been raised recently with the election of BlackBerry user Barack Obama as U.S. president.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.