Best of the blogs: Technology, like it or not, could be front-and-center in the 2008 presidential race, if not as a matter of candidate debate. “One concrete detail appears to be that malware authors, phishers and other assorted cyber-scum will attempt to take advantage of interest in the election to deliver a new wave of attacks,” reports Matt Hines in The politics of cybercrime. And of course they’ll practice a variety of techniques aimed at voters, and others. Secret polls, perhaps. Hines delves into several such possibilities. “There are plenty of other scenarios that could use attacks to alter the campaigning process as well.” Columnist’s corner: The trend of outsourcing to India is now taking a bi-directional twist of sorts, with Indian companies swallowing U.S. organizations — all of which leads to the question of whether or not we in the U.S. have cause for concern. “The offshore companies are rich with cash and a unique opportunity has arisen in the States with the strong rupee and low inflation,” Ephraim Schwartz explains in Indian outsourcers’ U.S. shopping spree. “The acquisition strategy cuts both ways. Companies need to understand the culture and way of working in whatever market place they want to play in. When IBM employs 53,000 people in India, that’s not just a play for cheap labor.” Security: This week’s Off the Record begins with a dilemma just about everyone in IT, and the users they support, can relate. What’s worse: passwords taped to the monitor or a boss who assigns them all? Our anonymous author was working at a hospice where the director refused to allow Active Directory to manage passwords. “She personally selected passwords that she knew her staff could remember and that she could remember also.” Our author left, but the battle — and a password disaster in the making — likely continues with some new contractor. The news beat: Sun delivers the first servers based on its UltraSparc T2 processors, which bring eight cores with eight threads per core. With its technical conference, Zend sets the stage for PHP, and plans to detail a refresh of its product line. Canonical, the entity behind Ubuntu Linux, says it is in discussions with a multinational hardware vendor to ship its Linux pre-installed. And AT&T buys 12Mhz of high-speed wireless spectrum from Aloha Partners for $2.5 billion. Security