Columnist’s corner: It’s a question that many of you are asking: Should IT care about the credit meltdown? “As IT professionals, we’ll be the last ones to know where the bad loans are buried. But we can at least be prepared for the likely fallout,” advises David Margulius. “I don’t want to be Dr. Doom, but it’s best to peek under the rug and be proactive.” It never hurts to polish the ol’ resume, either. Gripe Line: Government bureaucracies are particularly prone to taking the IE-only approach, Ed Foster suggests in Reader voices: Institutional IE. And it’s not just in the U.S. “Of course, there are always ways to get around what the government wants you to do.” The Firefox IE Tab extension is one. Security: The countdown to database timing attacks has begun. Core Security researcher Ariel Waissbein, in fact, has a proof-of-concept exercise that enables an attacker to extract private data from a database by performing mere record insertion operations, Matt Hines reports. The attack takes advantage of the fact that databases typically are designed to make data available to applications in the most efficient manner. “All the entries in a particular column in the database typically have the same values, so they can be unearthed by going after the stored information in the different nodes of a tree.” App dev: Calling backward compatibility with Windows versions from 15 years ago “one of the banes of my existence,” Martin Heller shares three tactics he uses for doing just that. The first is pre-emptive, the third a matter of testing. “It’s still a pain in the neck, however.” Technology Industry