Most of us in IT are aware of the recent data thefts of personal information within the United States government. Over the past couple weeks the VA admitted that files containing personal data for more than 50,000 active duty and more than 26 million veterans was stolen. In related news it was also reported that the "Energy Department disclosed to Congress on Friday that it suffered a security breach from a hacker in September that compromised 1,500 personnel records".

With the above stories fresh in our minds, we have chosen an opinion piece by Frank Hayes as this week's IT Quote of the Week:

For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We've been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet's filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.

Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org:

I have to admit something. Before today I had never visited Nick Lewis' blog. However, I'm extremely impressed with the how-to content on his site. I'm sort of known to be theme development "challenged", so I look forward to articles such as the one I'm reading now.

The following is an excerpt of his latest article with regards to theming in Drupal using the PHPtemplate engine:

Taking the term of Web 2.0 further, CNET has an article about Family 2.0 sites:

Cook is one of a growing number of parent-entrepreneurs who are putting their time and money behind their familial interests and starting a new generation of Web sites for parents and older people--sites that borrow many of the social networking concepts, such as photo-sharing and the wiki, that are found on well-known destinations like MySpace.com and the aforementioned Wikipedia.

I too have been seeing an increase in blog spam at some of our sister sites, especially those using Wordpress. Akismet, an anti-trackback spam group, is confirming the case in their own stats too. It looks to me that the spammers have declared a new war on many fronts. My theory, there are a lot of lonely servers on the University campus in the United States that are just sitting there now that the students have gone home for the summer.

This could be interesting for those that work with MS Word...the 2007 version will have blogging capability. It will be intesting to see how well Word will be compatible with third-party CMS applications.

osCommerce recommended a few months ago that osCommerce users update to the latest version, osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 051112 Update. The update "addresses security related issues and bug reports that exist in the released version". The changes are minimal and are not expected to break compatibility with contributions (third-party plugins). Additional information:

This update release focuses solely on security related issues and bug reports, and does not introduce any new features that have been made for the next development milestone release.

Thanks to Line 56 News, I came across MediaWiki . MediaWiki is the same wiki application that the famous Wikipedia site also uses. How can you argue with success?

While we are a little unclear as to the terms and license of the software, it is free software. This application is well worth the look for those interested in installing a Wiki on their server.

MediaWiki for Dummies - Line 56 News -

... MediaWiki site. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is a powerful collaboration platform and content management system. Start ...