Daily news beat for March 27, 2008

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Mar 27, 20081 min

One can only imagine that they chose the code-name before the most famous resident of New York’s capital city stole so many headlines; nonetheless Microsoft has been secretly working on the Albany project, a set of hosted, low-end productivity applications to compete with Google Docs.

Speaking at the Black Hat conference, London School of Economics Professor Ian O. Angell says that computers plus people equals risk. Angell says to expect uncertainty and be careful when crunching data because sometimes, “if you count, you miss the most obvious things.”

The Hacker Super Bowl, meanwhile, kicks off this week at CanSecWest, where organizers pit Mac OS X against Linux and Vista, and hackers get the chance to win a $20,000 purse by writing a zero-day attack that’s never been seen before.

AMD introduces new Phenom Chips, including its first triple-core offering, which OEMs have said will ship in PCs next quarter.

Amazon adds resilience to its cloud computing service in the form of two features designed to simplify failover and address management.

And as security threats increase, more IT shops are gripping PC reins tighter and blocking users from non-work Web sites and applications. Attacks are pushing Web controls.