Accountants and senior management at Dell cooked the books for more than three years, moving funds between accounts so the company could show it was meeting its quarterly targets, the company admitted in a filing this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That’s the conclusion of a year-long independent investigation into financial shenanigans at the company from 2003 through the first quarter of 2007.

A group of reporters and their family members whose private telephone records were secretly obtained as part of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s boardroom surveillance scheme sued the technology giant and two former executives.

Five separate lawsuits claiming "illegal and reprehensible conduct" were filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday against Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard, former Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and Kevin Hunsaker, the company’s former ethics chief.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco Systems Chairman and CEO John Chambers will discuss the future of the technology industry and their shared vision for addressing today’s customer requirements. The live Webcast will take place Monday, Aug. 20, 2007 from 7-8:30 a.m. PDT.

A word of caution about editing entries "anonymously" in Wikipedia: a tool has been developed that can show who made the changes.

Virgil Griffith, who will be a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology starting in September, has developed Wikipedia Scanner, a search tool that traces the IP address of people who make edits to the online encyclopedia.

While Wikipedia allows anyone to make edits, it keeps detailed logs of the changes made. And although people can make changes without identifying themselves, the changes often create digital fingerprints that provide information about the user, such as the location of the computer used to make the edit.

Developers need look no farther than the newly released 9Rays.Net CryptoSharp security software in their ongoing efforts to thwart hackers. Security tools, hash functions, and ciphers have been developed and bundled in a single library. With this security software, platform-independent code provides data compression and encryption functionality to enhance the security of 32 and 64 bit environments.

When using the 9Rays.Net CryptoSharp Security Library, file based data is protected using powerful encryption. Data compression is another function which is prominent in the new release, ensuring the best in data security. Standard .NET framework classes are used throughout the CryptoSharp Security Library, which simplifies the encrypted storage of existing programs, enhancing their security. Newly created security enabled applications are protected from their inception with the latest encryption.

According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, the percentage of female Computer Science undergraduates at major research universities in the United States has declined from 37 percent in 1985 to 14 percent in 2006.

This is a problem for technology companies, not only because of the shortage of talent trickling through the pipeline, but also because the diversity of this talent is a key element to designing the products that customers want to use.

To address this issue, Microsoft has been taking action since 2000 to help strengthen the pipeline and get more women excited to explore technology careers. As part of that effort, this week Microsoft kicks off its annual Redmond DigiGirlz camp, a week-long technology camp for girls.

Linux distributor Xandros is licensing messaging protocols from Microsoft as part of an expansion of the partnership the two companies forged in June.

Xandros, which offers desktop and server versions of Linux, is acquiring the specification and licenses for Exchange ActiveSync and Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol so its Scalix Mail Servers can better interoperate with Microsoft clients that now primarily interact with Microsoft’s Exchange Server messaging infrastructure.

Microsoft and Xandros first announced a pact to make their products more interoperable in June during Microsoft’s annual TechEd conference. Microsoft also agreed not to sue Xandros users for patent-infringement. Microsoft claimed earlier this year that Linux violates more than 230 patents it holds.

A new vulnerability in Yahoo’s instant messenger program can potentially cause unwanted code to run on a PC, according to security researchers.

Details of the vulnerability were first posted on a Chinese-language security forum and was later confirmed with Yahoo security officials, wrote Wei Wang, a researcher with McAfee’s Avert lab in Beijing, on a company blog. So far, no exploit code has been published, wrote Karthik Raman, also of McAfee.

The many multifaceted interactions between corporate users, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, Microsoft Exchange servers, networks and other infrastructure can lead to system downtime and can negatively effect worker productivity, as well as cause a major migraine for IT departments, according to a recent vendor-commissioned study.

Zenprise, which offers solutions to proactively troubleshoot problems in BES and Exchange environments, contracted Osterman Research to conduct the study. Respondents include 76 IT decision makers in North American companies running BlackBerry Enterprise Servers for Microsoft Exchange with at least 500 employees.

Microsoft is working with AMD to fix a bug in an ATI driver that ships preinstalled on millions of laptops and which leaves the Vista kernel open to arbitrary memory writes by malicious driver authors. It’s not just ATI–virtualization security researcher Joanna Rutkowska said during her presentation at Black Hat earlier in August that ATI, which is owned by AMD, and Nvidia are just two examples of particularly badly written drivers, and that there could be tens of thousands of vulnerable drivers out there.

The bug in the ATI driver is that it allows arbitrary memory writes. Malicious driver authors can use that flaw to load unsigned drivers via the standard loading mechanism.