Tech’s bottom line: Picking stocks is difficult in the best of times. Making things even trickier, “it’s been a Maalox, or maybe even a Xanax, couple of months,” Bill Snyder writes. “Investors have been whipsawed by market tumbles sparked by the still out-of-control mortgage mess.” And it’s not going calm anytime soon. Good tech stocks for a bad economy. Yes, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Xerox are among those. Just as important are knowing which to avoid, the companies that “aren’t necessarily bad investments. But they have a history of performing badly during an economic downturn. At other times, they may well be worth considering.” The news beat: Google develops a Wikipedia rival, currently in an invite-only beta, that unlike the original will feature bylined entries. Gateway says that CEO Ed Coleman will step down at January’s end, thereby clearing the way for the head of Acer’s Pan-American unit to take over. After online criminals used the security hole for attacks, Apple patches another QuickTime flaw, it’s eighth fix this year. And AMD CEO Hector Ruiz said “we blew it,” in 2007, and “we’re very humbled and we learned from it.” Security: Roger Grimes can understand why Web sites like self-service password reset. “It’s the incredible weakening of security that bothers me,” he writes. The problem, of course, is the questions, which often consist of information known by lots of people, or even answers that can be found by searching the Internet. “If a Web site under your control has one of these password reset features that use self-service, make sure the questions are truly capable of being known by only one person,” he espouses. In other words: Ask better password questions. “Assume that the person’s closest loved one ends up being their worst enemy and is motivated to break into their account. If you want to be assured of the strength of your question, or at least give the user a fighting chance of staying secure, let them choose and input the security questions.” Technology Industry