Symantec said on Monday that its president and vice chairman Gary Bloom will leave before the end of March, marking the security software maker’s latest executive departure and sending shares down 4 percent. Bloom joined Symantec via the $10.3 billion merger with Veritas Software, where he had served as chief executive officer and chairman. Symantec said it would not fill the position at the moment.

An anti-spyware watchdog group has lodged official complaints against 180solutions and one of its partners, dealing a blow to the adware industry’s efforts to police itself. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based public advocacy group, filed a pair of complaints with the Federal Trade Commission on Monday. The complaints charge 180solutions and free Web hosting provider CJB.net with engaging in unfair and deceptive business practices. 180Solutions deliberately and repeatedly duped Internet users into downloading intrusive advertising software, according to a Center for Democracy and Technology complaint. The company continued these practices even after it pledged to better itself and after receiving warnings from spyware experts and privacy advocates, the group said.

As spam evolves, so do spam filters. IronPort Systems is now rating Web links in email to better filter out junk messages, including those with links to malicious sites. The San Bruno, Calif.-based seller of antispam appliances announced the IronPort Web Reputation technology. The new technology looks at about 45 attributes of Web sites linked in an email message to assess whether a message might be spam, the company said in a statement. The new technology comes in response to new tactics used by spammers.

Antivirus vendors are warning of a rapidly-spreading worm that is carrying a potentially destructive set of instructions. The Nyxem worm–also nicknamed the Kama Sutra worm–is programmed to overwrite all of the files on computers it infects on February 3, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. F-Secure researchers found the worm truncates files to 20 bytes and causes an error message when one is opened. The worm appears to be programmed to overwrite all files on the third day of every month. So far, there’s no indication where Nyxem originated.

Although Microsoft is hard at work trying to ship Windows Vista this year, the company is beginning to set its sights on the next horizon, Vienna. Vienna, once labeled Blackcomb, is the new code name for the successor to Vista. It is not clear when Vienna might ship or what features it might contain. Microsoft confirmed the name change on Friday, but declined to comment on Vienna’s stage of development.

Members of the blogosphere were up in arms Friday after The Washington Post turned off comments on one of its blogs. WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady made the decision Thursday after the site’s Post.blog, on which editors discuss the paper’s policies, design and goals, featured a column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell defending her position in a Sunday article about fundraising scandals involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The controversy began when many Post readers wrote and called Howell complaining that she had accepted Republican talking points linking Democratic members of Congress to Abramoff. Howell’s defense in Post.blog attempted to soften the language she had used, but tried to make the point that Democrats had taken money from Abramoff’s clients.

DYS Analytics is debuting a new outbound messaging compliance solution. CONTROL! Guardian, for Domino, Sametime, and Exchange. The solution lets IT managers find and stop noncompliant message traffic before it is sent–ensuring corporate policies are met. Guardian also helps IT recover capacity squandered by inappropriate email and IM traffic, while also improving end-user productivity by eliminating unnecessary messages. The new product includes some content filtering capabilities not found in earlier DYS CONTROL! family solutions, as well as in-depth analysis and reporting features on email/IM trends–both on a quota level as well as on a content level.

As befits its indie roots, the Sundance Film Festival has long played host to innovations that have spread elsewhere. Blogging is one of them. Personal blogs, millions of them, are spreading on the Internet like kudzu, from LiveJournal.com to MySpace.com. Professional blogs such as Gawker Media’s gossipy Defamer.com draws some 270,000 page views per day. As blogs become more successful, they are challenging traditional media, and this year’s Sundance marks a fascinating juncture as newly powerful blogs take on the likes of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

Apple Computer’s announcement of new Macs based on processors from Intel raises an interesting question: since both the Mac and Windows operating systems now run on Intel-based hardware, shouldn’t it be easy to run both on the same computer? That simple question deserves a simple answer. But there isn’t one–at least not right now. Reaching the nirvana of running the two most popular desktop operating systems on one machine is a lot harder than you might expect. Apple has said that it wasn’t planning to support Windows on the "MacTel," but the company also said it wouldn’t try to stop people from doing so. Still, some of the technical choices Apple has made in designing the new Intel-based Macs have made running Windows a challenge. The good news? Plenty of people have been working to break down the barriers, so it should only be a matter of time before Windows shows up on the iMac.

One of our readers wants to go back to individual reminders, instead of a window listing them all. Can you? If so, how? This Answer Team article has the less-than-satisfying answer.

Read this OutlookPower article.