Columnists’ corner: When lawyers turn into de facto IT staffers, it cannot speak good things about the tech staff, be that in-house or outsourced. Take the network of this week’s Off the Record author, for instance. It serves a mere seven workstations, each of which ran a different OS. “I find it troubling that inept IT support firms like the one we use continue to enjoy the blind faith of their clients. The company my firm retains is still under contract. But the number of times they have been called since I (unofficially) took over the network is zero,” he explains in In outsourcers we trust. Best of the blogs: Notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick was himself the victim of hackers. In this case, they crept into the computer hosting his Web site and replaced his front page with a vulgar message in a move he claims was apparently directed at him. The news beat: Mac dreamers get a chance to put code to work in a new contest that offers developers a chance to have their ideas turned into bona fide shareware. A regulatory battle is brewing over VDSL in Germany. And Verizon aims to ease the move to IP contact centers with two new products. Careers: Bob Lewis explains the intricacies of reacting to comments concerning hair-loss. And not the kind that is necessarily specific to IT, though the reader was troubleshooting an employee’s laptop when the topic arose. Handling accidental rudeness. Software Development