Security: The FBI Bot Roast II operation snagged eight people who had committed a broad range of online crimes — but, quite naturally, it did not reveal much beyond the nature of the activities. “When InfoWorld decided to dig a little deeper, we found that the motivations of each perpetrator were far richer, and the nature of the crimes more complex, than a simple rundown of their rap sheets could express,” Andrew Brandt writes in True crime: The botnet barons. Take the Tacoma, WA man who gave an FBI agent access to a botnet which, it turns out, included an infected computer belonging to the Justice Department’s Antitrust division. Another, Gregory King, was motivated by vengeance after Castlecpos deleted some of his message board posts. One more: Azizbek Mamadjanov, whose “crimes fall about as far to the fringe of what’s considered a cybercrime as you can get — in this case, it was clearly a fraud that was simply enabled by the use of stolen online banking information.” Careers: An edgy reader writes to Bob Lewis asking what to do when you’ve heard you’re being replaced. Worse, the company has historically been known to send people packing, sans severance package, with a “Here’s your last paycheck. Good-bye.” The first thing to do is revisit the very nature of working for an employer. Next, be certain that what you’ve heard is not mere rumor. If you’re positive, “quietly and discreetly start an intensive search for a new position at a different company.” But if not, talking to your boss, without anger or accusation, ought to paint a pretty clear picture of what is or is not happening. “The only measure is your personal benefit, and you don’t benefit from a confrontation.”Hardware: To the notion that chip vendors are unreliable, John West asserts, “this ain’t news. Each of the chip manufacturers have missed schedules and shipped bad products in some years while others have had great years.” The latest mishap, of course, is AMD’s delayed Barcelona, due to a TLB bug, as well as the SPEC yanking all Opteron benchmark results and AMD’s underestimating of the chip’s power draw. “None of this is such a big deal for the desktop consumer.” But West explains that when chip makers mess up the fundamentals, the future of big compute suffers. “This model is fundamentally broken. The real cost of these mistakes is born by the system vendors, and by the HPC community.” Security