Best of the blogs: Call it ‘managing in the open.’ The 451 Group does, Gartner has touched upon the same theme, and IT Troubelshooter blogger Harper Mann agrees as well. “Open source network and systems monitoring and management vendors have been beating the drum with this message for a number of quarters,” Mann writes. That includes those anointed the Big Four, otherwise known as BMC, CA, HP, and IBM. Security: Black Hat kicks off this week with a twist. The conference’s focus is more on application security than Internet viruses, mirroring “the change in threats on the security landscape, with malware attacks morphing from generic Internet viruses into targeted attacks aimed at vulnerabilities in proprietary business IT systems,” Matt Hines reports. The even edgier Defcon show, meanwhile, kicks off tomorrow, also in Las Vegas. See our Special Report: Black Hat USA 2007/Defcon 15 for continuing coverage. Columnist’s corner: What works for that home PC doesn’t always apply to corporate servers — particularly when it comes to SCO Xenix machines. That became a hard lesson learned when a hired hand college student, Herman, tried it and found that on reboot the system started running fsck. Panic set in. Herman turned the system off in the middle of fsck. Next up: a boot disk, and pressure from admins to get the box up and running quickly. That’s when our Off the Record author returned and thought a restore from backup was in order. If only it had been that easy. “I told [Herman] he’d single-handedly destroyed the system and that he’d better be ready to explain it to the hard-ass guy who ran the company.” The news beat: Symantec details a prototype of Dark Vision, a research effort to mine underground Web sites where personal information is bought and sold by identity thieves. Merger costs dog Alcatel-Lucent’s second quarter earnings as do flat sales and a strong euro. San Francisco’s Wi-Fi wait grows as critical votes are delayed another month and EarthLink appears skittish about the prospect. And Computerworld reports that businesses are having second thoughts about upgrading to Windows Vista. Software Development