Residents of New York, Detroit and Los Angeles are the most at risk of having their identity stolen, according to new research. By contrast, people in Wyoming run the lowest risk of identity fraud, according to ID Analytics, a company that provides fraud intelligence services to businesses. Other states with low rates of identity related fraud are Vermont and Montana, ID Analytics said. Its new research report is slated to be published Wednesday.

In 2005, the US Congress passed a bill changing the start and end dates of Daylight Savings Time (DST). Starting this year, DST begins three weeks earlier and ends one week later than previously. This change affects virtually every electronic device and computer program that deals with the time of day. If you use Windows, Windows Mobile, Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, or pretty much any other electronic anything, you are affected to

Read this OutlookPower article.

The head of Microsoft’s efforts to bring together voice and data messaging is moving to a new post at the company, with divisional president Jeff Raikes stepping in to absorb his duties. Anoop Gupta, who helped build the 4-year-old unified communications group, joined Craig Mundie’s research and strategy unit last week as corporate vice president of technology policy and strategy. All of Gupta’s direct reports will be managed by Raikes, who will oversee the unit in addition to his other duties. Raikes is responsible for all of the company’s business software including Office and Microsoft Business Solutions products.

One "bad apple" can spread negative behavior like a virus to bring down officemates or destroy a good team, according to a new study examining conflict in the workplace. Negative behavior outweighs positive behavior, so a bad apple can spoil the whole barrel, but one or two good workers can’t "unspoil" it, researchers at the University of Washington said in the current issue of the journal Research in Organizational Behavior.

IObit has released the new version of their flagship product–IObit SmartDefrag–that is designed for Windows Vista. The freeware, which is a beta version, is a comprehensive defragment tool capable of automatically or manually defragmenting and optimizing hard drives.

Joanna Rutkowska has always been a big supporter of the Windows Vista security model. Until she stumbled upon a "very severe hole" in the design of UAC (User Account Control) and found out–from Microsoft officials–that the default no-admin setting isn’t even a security mechanism anymore. Rutkowska, a hacker with a track record of defeating Vista’s security mechanisms, believes UAC has a major flaw in the way it automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges.

Visto Corporation, the partner company behind mobile email services from more than 30 of the world’s largest mobile service providers, announced the findings of a survey the company commissioned to identify and target key drivers for mobile email adoption. Based on the research, Visto predicts that market penetration of mobile email could reach as high as 70 percent of mobile professionals by the end of 2007. Close to 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that, just a year ago, they regarded mobile email as solely the domain of the elite within an organization, too expensive, or limited to a few special devices. Today, those attitudes have changed, with 70 percent believing that the service had become less exclusive, more affordable, and with far greater device choice.

Although Microsoft and Novell are collaborating on virtualization to enable Windows Server to run on SUSE Linux, and vice-versa, Novell and Intel have advanced toward that goal with the release of paravirtualized network and block device drivers that allow Windows Server to run unmodified in Xen virtual environments. These device drivers support SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and work on Intel-based server platforms featuring chipsets using Intel-VT (Virtualization Technology). The new drivers will let customers migrate to newer and fewer energy-efficient servers, consolidating legacy Windows or Linux solutions onto virtual servers.

A Belgian court ruled on Tuesday that Google may not reproduce extracts from a variety of Belgian newspapers, imperiling one of the Web search leader’s most popular services if other courts follow suit. The case was brought by Copiepresse, which manages copyrights for Belgium’s French- and German-language newspapers and has also demanded that the French division of Internet portal Yahoo stop displaying Belgian press reports. Copiepresse argues that versions of news articles stored on Google can be seen on its service even after the articles are no longer freely accessible on a newspaper’s Web site.

Yahoo said it has embedded instant messaging features inside its email program, bridging a generational divide that has confused many users. Heavy Internet users, especially younger, Web-savvy users of social networking sites or office workers, have long toggled between email and instant messaging services. Consumers can now run the two programs in one Web browser.