Top 10: HP layoffs, Wall Street blues, Palin’s hack

The week got off to a rough start with the collapse of Lehman Brothers sending shudders through global financial markets and raising questions about whether there will be a ripple effect on the IT industry. After the market closed Monday, Hewlett-Packard added to the dismal mood by announcing it will lay off 24,600 employees as it integrates Electronic Data Systems into the HP fold. Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was the victim of an apparent hacking attack on the Yahoo account she uses for official business as governor of Alaska, and VMworld brought tales of a new OS that would leave tradional ones on the trash heap.

[ Video: Catch up on the top stories of the week with the World Tech Update ]

1. Update: HP announces 24,600 layoffs in wake of EDS acquisition: Hewlett-Packard added to a bad-news Monday after the plunging stock market closed, announcing it would lay off 24,600 employees as it works to integrate its $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems into the company. Layoffs had been expected, but the size of them came as a surprise.

2. Wall Street turmoil unlikely to KO IT industry and Financial crisis signals end of an era in Wall Street IT world: The ongoing U.S. financial system crisis will not have a dramatic effect on IT spending among financial institutions, according to some IT analysts, while others feel certain that IT spending in the securities segment of the industry will be forever altered, partly because struggling firms will be acquisition targets whose tech assets will be absorbed as part of purchase deals.

3. Report: Legislator’s son at center of Palin hack talk and Lessons of the Sarah Palin e-mail hack: Screenshots of Sarah Palin’s e-mail were posted at various Web sites, including the Wikileaks.org site. While the FBI and the Secret Service investigate, focusing on a Tennessee legislator’s son, security researchers are debating how the hack might have been carried out — one claim circulating the Internet is that a simple password-reset request was at the heart of the hack. Some researchers are dubious it was that simple; others say it might well have been.

4. Canvas set to boost AJAX: Canvas, a planned HTML standard for arbitrary graphical rendering in browsers, could very well be a game-changing technology according to advocates at ZendCon 2008. With Canvas, developers can paint anything they like and are no longer wedded to merely a paradigm of boxes and images, which is a radical departure from current app dev.

5. Google shows Android running on a phone in Europe: Google gave a sneak peek at the Android operating system running on a mobile-phone demonstration during Google Developer Day in Europe. T-Mobile has a launch event set for next Tuesday, but Android phones aren’t expected to be out until the end of October or thereabouts. Google has been cagey about showing off the mobile OS, but it allowed Mike Jennings, an Android development advocate, to give a look-see during a presentation.

6. VMware’s VirtualCenter coming to Linux, iPhone: At the VMworld show, the virtualization company announced plans to expand its horizons beyond Microsoft Windows Server and into open-source software as well as mobile devices like the iPhone. VMware CTO Stephen Herrod also outlined his company’s goal to “make sure we can run any application at all, no matter how much performance it demands.”

7. Beware of open source violations lurking in your code: As open source rises in popularity, so too does the likelihood that licensing violations have seeped into your applications. Many companies make the mistake of thinking that open source doesn’t have to be managed like proprietary compnents, which can lead to unintentional violations. One good solution is to have a legal and management review before any open-source code is implemented — better to catch errors before they become ingrained in a project.

8. Apple update finally fixes important DNS bug: Apple released a security update for the Mac OS X operating system that patched more than 25 bugs, including the critical DNS bug that it failed to fully fix with a patch in July.

9. Berners-Lee starts foundation aimed at Web’s future: World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee is starting a foundation that will aim to take the Internet to all the world. The World Wide Web Foundation is supposed to be up and running early next year with a goal to “advance a Web which is open and free,” Berners-Lee said at an event announcing his plans. The foundation will advocate for democracy, free speech and the freedom to access any online content Internet users want.

10. VMware chief says the OS is history: VMware CEO Paul Maritz outlined ideas for a new virtual datacenter OS that would relegate traditional OSes to the dustbin. The VDC OS is an attempt to extend the use of virtualization beyond the server, applying the same principles to all the other hardware in a datacenter, including network switches and storage. By creating this virtual environment, IT departments will be able to move application workloads to new hardware easily when extra capacity is needed, and set up new environments for running applications more quickly. It will create an “internal cloud computing environment” for the datacenter.