IBM has come out and said it: The way a company treats environmental responsibility and green tech issues reflects on its corporate ethics. There, I’ve said it, too. The company’s consulting division has even come out this week with the IBM Corporate Social Responsibility Benchmarking Service so that YOUR business can figure out where it stands. The exercise will help a company figure out whether it views corporate social responsibility as an expense or an investment (half full vs. half empty), how effective its policies are for things like environmental policies, labor practices and regulatory compliance, and where the company stands with customers on all of the above. And, by the way, does it even KNOW what customers think? Here’s…

Online rule: Don’t get into a fight with anyone online. This one is adapted from a recent Twitter experience in which I got into a twit fight with a twit… This paraphrases a Confucius saying: Don’t get into an argument with an idiot because people passing by might not be able to tell the difference. I think that’s very true in the online world. Do you have any favorite rules regarding online behavior?

Get the answers to all of your questions about MP3 players, headphones, and more in this weekly feature.

As of July 1, Microsoft will stop broad distribution of Windows XP. On the second edition of the Daily Debrief, CNET News.com’s Kara Tsuboi and Ina Fried break down the rationale behind the decision and suggest tips for consumers who are reluctant to switch over to Vista.

Seeing as how patent reform has died on the vine, several tech and telecom companies are taking matters into their own hands, the Wall Street Journal reports. Scared by the NTP v Research in Motion case, in which the BlackBerry maker came perilously close to folding under the burden of patent prosecution by the troll NTP, Google, HP, Verizon, Ericsson and Cisco have banded together as the Allied Security Trust in order to engage in what you could call defensive trolling – buying up IP before it can be used against them. In 1990, there were 921 patent prosecutions in the U.S. Last year, through October, there were 2,500. The Allied Security Trust members will pay $250K to join and…

Another day, another gaping hole affecting fully patched versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. According to a warning from US-CERT, proof-of-concept exploit code has been published for a new zero-day bug that can be used for a variety of malicious attacks against Windows users running IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8 beta 1. The code, published here by ’sirdarckat’,  shows how the vulnerability can be exploited to hijack an iFrame in a legitimate site and capture a target’s keystrokes. This occurs because  Internet Explorer fails to properly restrict access to a document’s frames, allowing an attacker to modify the contents of frames in a different domain. [ SEE: Zero-day flaw haunts Internet Explorer ] This screenshot (of a proof-of-concept…

Corporations over time gain social responsibility for the products they release: Microsoft and their report abuse features, Facebook and their privacy settings, and now Google are adding more to the list. I spoke some time ago about plagiarism, more on a positive note, considering the use of plagiarism detection style software is being used for finding authors of extremist material. Now, however, Google are adding another category of products to the blacklist of advertisements and sponsors provided with each search result. Although this is old news, dating back as far as 2007, any advertisements which display anything to do with essay writing, or providing essays and coursework for students at college or university, have been banned. Plagiarism is a serious…

Facebook is building out its infrastructure so it can keep up with the 250,000 new users it adds each day. In an interview Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, talks about server purchasing strategy. In a CIO Sessions interview with Dan Farber (see Dan’s transcript), Heiliger acknowledged the scaling up challenge and said Facebook recently completed a server bake-off with the following three options: Build your own servers; Buy servers through OEMs; Play pricing arbitrage and lock in prices today. After going through the RFP process, Facebook went with the second and third options. Like any commodity there’s a little futures gamesmanship involved. Heiliger noted that Facebook is trying to lock in component price drops in the…

I often hear from companies that want to “be social” or “hire a blogger.” Usually, there hasn’t been any effort put into the question of what they’d like to accomplish from the effort, so I send out the following. Now, you can call me to talk when you have an answer to this critical question in mind…. The following goals for blogging are for your consideration in making a resource and time decision about how to use the tools available to achieve the impact your company desires. They may be combined or phased in over time, but it is essential that the company understand what it wants out of a blog or a community grown around its site. Simply “hiring…

Convenient, well-designed camcorders that look pricier than they are, models in the Canon FS series–FS11, FS10, and FS100–nevertheless deliver typical budget video in line with their budget price tags.