Short takes from this week's news
Councils achieve £1bn savings target and more
Councils have saved £1,218m through efficiencies, the Local Government Association claimed last week. Councils protected and improved services, said the LGA in its Forward Look annual efficiency statements. The efficiency gains exceed the government target of £1,035m.
Liberty Alliance moves to check wave of ID theft
Authentication standards organisation the Liberty Alliance is to form a technical group to address the threat of identity theft by finding technical solutions to prevent it. Identity theft and losses of personal data have recently affected CitiBank, MCI, Lexis-Nexis, Stanford University, Time Warner and Bank of America.
Sun squishes Java bugs before users get bitten
Sun Microsystems has fixed two bugs in Java that remote attackers can exploit to hijack computers. Security research company Secunia said the flaws were highly critical. One bug affects the Java Runtime Environment, which runs Java applications on users' machines; the other affects Java Web Start, which loads Java applications over the internet. Sun said it wasn't aware of any exploits of the flaws.
JBoss group prepares public sector onslaught
Professional open source company JBoss has formed the JBoss Government Group to promote the use of open source in the public sector. Drew Ladner, former CIO of the US Treasury, heads the new group. The JBoss strategy will include promoting open source standards in the public sector and offering its own JBoss Enterprise Middleware System as a solution.
Big Blue gives its new blades a dual-core sheen
IBM is launching blade servers that use AMD's new single and dual-core 64-bit Opteron processors. Big Blue is introducing the IBM eServer Cluster 1350 blade with the AMD Opteron LS20 dual-core chip to provide more flexibility and processing power in clustered systems. Clustered platforms integrate servers to increase processing power for demanding applications. Dual-core chips, which have more than one processor on a single piece of silicon, increase productivity further. The first IBM servers equipped with the new AMD64 chips will be available from next month, and will start from £1,200.
