The feature well: Yes, it’s that time once again. From the hundreds of IT products InfoWorld’s Test center evaluated over the last 12 months, we choose and recognize those most groundbreaking, capable, polished and valuable — across an overflowing fistful of categories that include everything from application development to networking to security. 2008 Technology of the Year Awards. The winners represent the cream of the crop, to be certain. Best of the blogs: “What the hell is wrong with Microsoft these days?” Randall Kennedy begins Flyback to the future. “It seems like every time their R&D folks come up with something unique and powerful (volume snapshots), some idiot further down the program management chain steps in and cripples it.” This time around Kennedy is referring to Microsoft’s Vista Backup utility, which Kennedy considers a technically superior solution that is hamstrung by several factors. So much so that the FOSS folks are working on their own alternative, dubbed Flyback and “progressing so well that the developers have time to indulge in little side projects, like a promised ‘3D’ effect for restoring archived files/folders.” The news beat: Microsoft bids $1.2 million for Fast Search and Transfer, which it says it will integrate into SharePoint as a means to build out high-end search offerings. Symantec says that the U.S. government needs to take new cybersecurity steps as it accounted for just more than a quarter of data breaches that could lead to identity theft in the first half of last year. IBM, meanwhile, digs into security management and says that building out its portfolio in that area is both ongoing and inevitable. And Linux creator Linus Torvalds maintains that he is sticking with the GPL 2, though the Free Software Foundation has released GPL 3, because version 2 still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel now. Software Development