Antivirus company Kaspersky will concentrate on whitelisting in version 8.0 of its enterprise security software, according to David Em, senior technology consultant for Kaspersky.

The company already uses some digital certificates to authenticate applications -- it plans to move more in this direction.

"Application integrity control prevents external processes such as malware injecting code," said Em at the IDC's IT Security conference 2007. "We want to take it to the next step."

However, Richard Jacobs, chief technology officer of Sophos, a rival to Kaspersky, said in a speech at the conference that application whitelists can cause "systems paralysis".

"Avoid application whitelist paralysis," said Jacobs. "Whitelists just don't work -- they're too intrusive."

I suppose IT managers will have decide for themselves based on their own systems requirements.

One council worker has been sacked, and two have lost their jobs over spending too much time on auction site eBay, reports the BBC.

Apparently some of the the staff members at Neath Port Talbot were spending up to two hours a day on eBay and entertainment sites such as sports pages.

It's a thorny problem for all businesses -- the amount of internet freedom to allow employees.

Search and advertising giant Google has welcomed the ISO decision to not approve the fast track of Office Open XML (OOXML) proposed standard DIS 29500 (ECMA 376) at this time.

A Google Code blog post states:

"Our engineers conducted an independent analysis of the OOXML specification and found several areas of concern, which we communicated both to the ISO and to the public. These include and are not limited to the following:

- for a specification of this size it was not given enough time for review;
- the undocumented features of OOXML prevents its implementation by other vendors;
- dependencies on other Microsoft proprietary formats and their technical defects makes it difficult to fully implement; and
- the overall cost for vendors of implementing multiple standards (hence the lack of OOXML implementations in the marketplace).

It is also incompatible with the existing ISO standard ISO 26300:2006, the Open Document Format (ODF), which already offers a high degree of interoperability, wide support, and offers the level playing field the world needs. Google is a supporter of ODF and has successfully integrated this open format into Google Docs and Spreadsheets. ODF also enjoys implementation in over twelve other products."

South Korea has sent Intel an equivalent of the EC's 'statement of objections', with accusations of anti-competitive behaviour, according to the Financial Times.

After a two year investigation, the South Korean Fair Trade Commission has accused Intel of pressuring computer makers to buy its microprocessors rather than those of rival AMD.

From the article:

"Chuck Mulloy, Intel spokesman, said the company received the statement of objections last week. It contained preliminary allegations and did not amount to a finding that there had been any violations of Korean law, he said.

“We are hopeful that we will be able to show to the commission’s satisfaction that the microchip market is functioning normally and our conduct has been pro-competition and ultimately beneficial to consumers,” he said."

I've just been speaking to one of the guys from Altiris, and he told me that Symantec is due to announce a new Altiris/Symantec product in the coming weeks.

Symantec bought the SOA management company in April, and both companies have been quietly following their product roadmaps since then. The new Altiris/Symantec offering will be a "major security endpoint product which takes a platform approach to security" according to my source.

Apparently, the product will extend Altiris' playing field into the firewall area, while adding inventory deployment and management to Symantec's portfolio. So there you go.

I also spoke to someone from Altiris on a more formal note, about how Altiris has been integrating with Symantec since the acquisition. Keep an eye on ZDNet UK News for more info.