Mari-Len De Guzman

Looters are going outside the streets of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina's hardest-hit US city, and setting up shop on the Internet where potential prey abounds. E-looters are using known methods such as phishing and spam e-mail, but hiding them under Katrina's cloak to rip off unsuspecting victims.

When railway contractor Holland Company converted its collaboration software from Microsoft Exchange to IBM Lotus Notes, the company knew its current applications could stay on track without getting derailed by future upgrades. And even as Armonk, NY-based IBM Corp. launched Lotus Notes 7, Big Blue's newest version of the Lotus Notes collaboration platform, Holland Company was confident it could upgrade to the new version without ever worrying about rewriting its existing applications

The ministry's Natural Resources Information Centre (NRIC) recently rolled out ICE3, an automated call centre communications system that enables callers to obtain information about MNR and its 43 field offices through interactive, self-service speech-recognition technology. Callers are prompted to utter words or phrases pre-recorded in the system.

Voice over IP (VoIP) may be gaining ground in the consumer market, but companies are taking their VoIP deployment one step at a time, generally using the technology within the confines of the enterprise network. Businesses are not too concerned about VoIP security either, according to industry experts. And as long as VoIP communications are within the bounds of the company network, security is a no-brainer, they say.

Ever get that eerie feeling that you

Global financial services firm HSBC Holdings has teamed up with software developer SAS Institute Inc. to fight payment card fraud through "intelligent" fraud detection.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp. has embarked on a global initiative to promote wireless connectivity in local government services, as Canadian cities watch in the sidelines for "lessons learned" from the pilot implementations.

Refurbishing old computers for re-use is a common alternative in e-waste management, but vendors are wary that it's not really solving the end-of-life issue, but merely delaying it. Industry Canada's Computers for Schools (CFS) program has been a 13-year beneficiary for obsolete computers that would have otherwise been dumped in landfills across the country or exported to "recyclers" in China.