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I have been on the road for the past few weeks, last week I was in the Middle East and this week I come to you from Scotland. These places would appear to the outsider as being very different places but not when it comes to IT. One topic that was common throughout most meetings that I attended was on the subject of the insider threat, something getting inside a network and causing a problem.

The Jury is back with its crucial verdict on whether Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) infringed Oracle's (NASDAQ:ORCL) copyright. But it's unclear whether it's a usable decision, leaving the software-development world in a proper pickle. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers break out the Magic 8-Ball.

The jury is out (literally) on the first, critical phase in the case of Oracle v Google. It's a decision that could have huge, far-reaching effects on software developers. Let's unpick it, in The Long View...
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Capturing packets from computer networks can sometimes sound like an activity reserved for hackers and geeks. Looking at a stream of raw packets is not for the fainthearted, but thankfully there are a number of technologies out there that can make the task easier.

In Disney's "Tron" an evil computer program seeks to enslave all to the "system" while the hero Tron "fights for the users." This battle is being played out as tablets and other technologies put the power in the hands of users, enabling unprecedented agility.

[Updated: More about battery life and price] Yesterday, at Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) in Beijing, we were told that the next wave of Ultrabooks will start at $699. These new, less-expensive, skinny laptops are just around the corner, apparently. But how is that low price-point possible? I've got the answers in The Long View...
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Collaboration within and between organizations requires some kind of technology solution, but getting the solution up and running, especially with today's SaaS-based offerings, has far more to do with overcoming change management challenges than surmounting technical hurdles.

Over at the Ethergeek blog last week, Josh Stephens had an interesting piece on the challenges of finding experts with data center expertise. Another trend that I see is the centralization of IT staff to main data centers. Gone are the days of having a dedicated IT person at sites which run a number of local services or applications.

This brings its own problems as it can be cost and time prohibitive travelling to these sites to diagnose and fix problems. The good news is that there are a number of technologies out there that can make this task easier.

A respected email technologist has been quoted in the mainstream media as saying he has a plan to solve spam. Oh really? Sadly, it seems he's just repeating a failed idea...
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We are seeing IT-centric innovation become the key to competitive advantage. IT is not longer about delivering a rock-solid general ledger system and a CRM system that lets you deliver incrementally better customer service than others in your market. It's also about incubating ideas that can make sure you're the disruptor, instead of the disruptee.

Cloud-computing management software startup Opscode is announcing a big funding boost. Its open-source Chef product and service seem to have given some hungry VCs a healthy appetite. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers run the numbers.

In my previous post on the BitTorrent protocol, I took a look at how BitTorrent operates as a very efficient way of downloading and uploading data. For this post I am going to take a look at how you can detect for its presence on a network. There are many reasons why you would want to do this, from investigating DMCA notifications to finding out where all your Internet bandwidth has gone. The three main ways in which I see BitTorrent been used.

Now that technologies can be turned on and off like a spigot, scaled to demand, and iterated to real-time business challenges, CIOs need an elastic talent model to maintain their agility.

Here we go again. It's more bad news for embattled would-be LTE provider LightSquared. Now Sprint is kicking the company when it's down. But the consequences could be a long and expensive court battle: Bad news for U.S. taxpayers, as we'll see in The Long View...
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For years, IT leaders have been talking about business alignment. And we should continue to do so. IT, after all, exists to support the business. It does, however, take two to tango. So while IT continues to try to better align itself with the business, it might also make sense for the business to participate more aggressively in achieving that alignment.