Top 10: Passport snoops, Verizon bids, Clarke dies

1. Obama passport records breached; IT system flagged violation : In what a U.S. Department of State spokesman called “imprudent curiosity,” contract employees working for the department snooped into the passport records of U.S. Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for president. An in-house computer system at State brought to light the records breaches, which had been downplayed by supervisors in the department. Two of the employees were fired by the contractors for whom they worked. A third employee also was involved in accessing records. The State Department refused to name the two contract companies or the employees, but on Friday confirmed that contract employees also accessed the passport records of New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who is Obama’s opponent in the race to be the Democratic nominee, and Arizona Senator John McCain, who has already locked up the Republican nomination.

[ Video: The IT week in review in the World Tech Update ]

2. Verizon gobbles up spectrum at 700Mhz auction and Wireless auction yields mixed results for consumers : Verizon Wireless won almost all of the licenses on the “C block” of open-access spectrum auctioned by the Federal Communications Commission. Verizon bid $4.7 billion for rights to the licenses in the 22MHz block of spectrum and won in every U.S. region except Alaska. Rival AT&T took home more than 150 licenses on the B block, which includes individual metro areas in the U.S. As far as what that means for the rest of us, it’s a mixed bag, with analysts saying consumers should have more choices and new types of services. The FCC required winners to allow any phone or application to run on their new networks in the acquired spectrum blocks and that “open access” is expected to lead to more options for users. However, the carriers will have to foot the bill for the spectrum auction and invest in new networks, which means it will be a while before prices go down.

3. Tech visionary Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90 : Arthur C. Clarke died Tuesday at his home in Sri Lanka. The science fiction author and visionary was 90. Born in 1917 in Minehead, Somerset, England, where his surviving siblings still live, Clarke was interested in science and science fiction at a young age. He was a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force during World War II, working on radar defense systems. He then went on to earn degrees in mathematics and physics at King’s College London. His story, “The Sentinel,” written in 1948, inspired the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey . While more people know him for that creative endeavor, he also developed the conceptual framework for geostationary satellites, which stay in the same spot and serve as relays for ground signals. Geostationary satellites are placed in the Clarke Orbit. At his birthday celebration last December, he offered wishes for humans to break our dependence on fossil fuels, as well as his hope for peace in Sri Lanka and that extraterrestrial beings will be discovered.

4. Adobe backtracks on flash for iPhone: So, last week Steve Jobs said that Adobe Systems’ Flash technology isn’t suitable for Apple’s iPhone. But that didn’t stop Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen from saying this week during a conference call with investors that with Apple releasing its iPhone SDK (which exceeded developers’ expectations ), his company intends to bring Flash to the iPhone. “Flash is synonymous with the Internet and, frankly, anybody who wants to browse the Web and experience the Web’s glory really needs Flash support,” he said. But by week’s end, Adobe saw fit to add that, well, Flash for the iPhone really does depend on Apple’s cooperation, even beyond the SDK and its current license.

5. Emerging technologies will soon marginalize IT’s role in BI : Corporate IT departments will be marginalized in their roles in business intelligence because search and collaboration tools will enable users and business units to develop their own applications, research firm Gartner predicted in a study this week. IT’s role in business intelligence will be diminished by 2012 as emerging technologies change how we work. Those technologies will include interactive visualization, integrated search, and in-memory analytics, along with software as a service and service-oriented architecture. Workers will use those technologies in such a way that they will rely less on IT, Gartner said. “The reality is that central IT has very little power to prevent business units (and users) from adopting these technologies,” the report said. And then there is this….

6. Storage revolution shuffling IT jobs : Responsibility for storage is shifting within IT departments as data keeps rolling into enterprise systems. Demand for storage capacity grows 60 percent annually, IDC has found, and data retention and disclosure laws mean that isn’t likely to change soon. “With the sheer complexity of some companies’ information infrastructures, you wonder whether one person can really get their hands around it all,” said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT. “It’s really requiring storage administrators and executives, including CIOs, to think of it in a more holistic way.” Storage area networks and virtualization are part of that more holistic approach, but some companies are finding that they also need to change who is in charge of storage and related projects in their shops.

7. Yahoo to Microsoft: Cheapskate : Yahoo fired the latest salvo in its public slugfest over Microsoft’s (increasingly) hostile bid , by releasing details of a months-old internal plan that says Yahoo will double operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7 billion over the next three years. Yahoo is using the plan, given to its board last December, as proof that Microsoft has undervalued Yahoo in bidding $44.6 billion for the company. Yahoo then issued a news release with details of the plan, but refused to comment beyond that, so it’s not clear why the company waited until now to let the plan be known.

8. Multicore boom needs new developer skills : A worldwide shortage of people with experience in parallel computing is partly behind a plan by Microsoft and Intel to donate $20 million to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The funds will be divided over five years to researchers who are working on applications for multicore processors. A “collateral reason” for the funding initiative is to raise awareness at universities that parallel computing knowledge is important for future developers, said Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore computing at Microsoft. Even though multithreaded computing isn’t new “I’ve heard very little about colleges teaching multithreaded programming, but I would think and hope that it’s changing very quickly,” said Mike Lydon, CTO at software development company TopCoder.

9. Deal to buy 3Com falls apart : Bain Capital Partners and Huawei Technologies in China have given up their plan to buy 3Com after the U.S. government raised security concerns that held up the deal. The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States planned to act to prohibit the deal, Bain said. Bain would have had an 83.5 percent stake in the U.S. networking company, with Huawei having the remainder. But the deal had critics from the outset, who raised worries over Huawei’s ties to the Chinese government.

10. Tech money going to Democrats by a wide margin and Survey: IT workers like McCain, Obama : IT companies are giving Democrats more money than Republicans in this election year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Major tech companies have given $15.5 million to candidates and parties, with $9.4 million of that going to Democrats and $6 million to Republicans. Microsoft has handed out the most, at a little more than $1 million, with Chairman Bill Gates giving individual contributions as well. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison forked over $5,000 to the Every Republican is Crucial PAC. Even so, 70 percent of the donations made so far by Oracle have been to Democrats. In a separate study by Rasmussen Reports, 29 percent of those who identified themselves as IT workers said they support Democrat Barack Obama, with 29 percent also saying they support Republican John McCain. Thirteen percent are backing Democrat Hillary Clinton. But the poll, taken in February and early March, also found support for Republican Mike Huckabee, who hadn’t yet dropped out of the race, and for Republican Ron Paul.