Columnist’s corner: With some 20 years of IT experience under his belt our Off the Record author offers this advice: Take a risk every now and then. It paid off for him, and led to reorganizing the IT department at a major cosmetics firm, identifying drug abuse in patients using pain killers, and picking up on duplicate payments to vendors at a large shipping company. “I did almost all of these things on my own time. I asked for help where required and happily shared the credit. But basically it was me sitting at home writing code,” he explains. “I became a company star.” Security: It’s something shocking, though not altogether surprising, to read that one-third of all Web sites are vulnerable to a data attack. That’s according to a report compiled by WhiteHat Security, tracking 15 months of assessments across millions of active URLs. The news beat: AT&T reveals intentions to aim the Apple iPhone at business users and, as such, is working to make its back-end systems operate with the device by the time it ships. Analyst house Gartner says that modern IT shops need an overhaul and predicts a demise of the conventional IT organization. AMD looks to raise $2.2 billion through a debt sale. And Intel says that it will give future processors new tasks, including some currently handled by other chips within the PC. Notes from the field: It could soon be raining subpoenas in Mountain View, Cringe asserts, referring to the town in which Google is headquartered. At issue is the company’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, a move that has many in the industry up in arms, mostly asking what Google’s intentions are for all the information it will be able to gather. “The bigger question is what other folks will be able to do with it once Google has collected it,” Cringe explains in Excuse me, but you’ve just stepped in some DoubleGoo. “Now it’s Google’s turn to come up with a really good answer.” Careers