Storage: With a failed hard drive and backups gone wrong, our Off the Record author sought ‘expedited’ services for recovering the data. The vendor promised to be done in 4 days, with progress reports every 4 hours. Well, zero reports and 16 days later, they said the data was finally ready, and so was the whopping bill. “But there was a catch.” The data recovery company refused to accept credit card payment — and, despite broken promises and missed deadlines, they wouldn’t budge. “Never in my life had I had such a good argument and not gotten what I wanted.” Security: InfoWorld’s own Enterprise Data Protection Forum kicks off today in the Big Apple, and Paul Roberts is blogging live from the scene. First up is an entry on keynote speaker Stephen Katz, president of Security Risk Solutions. The moral: CISO’s need to make even rank and file employees understand why security is important to them and their customers, Katz said. Gripe Line: Ed Foster typically breaks tech companies down into one of two molds: those run by engineers, and those by marketeers. Well, now Microsoft, it appears, belongs to yet another category: companies run by their lawyers. At issue is its internal squabbling over virtualization licensing. “It’s inevitable that one of the main uses of virtualization technology in the coming years is going to be by Linux and Intel Mac users who need to run a Windows app or two and don’t mind the performance hit of a virtual system,” Foster writes in Lawyers virtually call the tune in Redmond. “Who else is going to think the solution to fighting a form of piracy that DRM can’t prevent is to have a prohibition against it deep in the fine print?” The news beat: Microsoft’s Virtual Earth gets a new dimension through a partnership with Dassault Systemes that will enable users to contribute 3D models of buildings featured on the maps. Symantec takes heat over its Chinese compensation offer, with critics saying it just isn’t enough. And Sun needs AMD chips to launch Constellation, the supercomputer it has been working on to compete with IBM’s Blue Gene/P.