Computerworld UK, Computerworlduk.com

Global PC shipments will top 366 million units this year, according to a new forecast from Gartner.

The analyst is predicting a 19.7 per cent increase from 305.8 million units shipped in 2009, with global PC spending forecast to reach $245 billion (£163 billion) in 2010, an increase of 12.2 per cent from 2009.

Gary McKinnon, the man accused of hacking into the NASA and Pentagon IT systems in 2001 and 2002, has been dealt another blow in his fight against extradition to the U.S.

Artwork: Diego AguirreMcKinnon has Asperger's syndrome, but Home Secretary Alan Johnson has turned down an appeal to block the extradition on medical grounds.

British businesses are losing a total of £300 million (about US$429 million) annually by leaving their computers switched on overnight, researchers have calculated.

Artwork: Chip TaylorAround a third of UK workers leave their PCs on at night and during weekends, pushing up electricity bills by up to £17 (US$24) per computer each year, said the report, which was commissioned by not-for-profit group the Alliance to Save Energy and power management supplier 1E, and conducted by Harris Interactive.

Businesses can make use of Twitter as a public relations channel, but they need to be aware of security when sharing ideas, Gartner has said.

The social networking site allows users to post short messages, or microblogs. Gartner predicts that by 2011, enterprise microblogging will be a standard feature of 80 percent of social software platforms, even though most are currently consumer orientated.

Illustration: Diego AguirreCloud computing is being over-hyped, and enterprises should be wary after high-profile outages at providers such as Amazon cloud services, said analyst firm Ovum.

A raft of IT-as-a-service offerings have emerged in recent years, including Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) along with Google Apps offering and the Salesforce platform-as-a-service product.

IT departments must establish a "green baseline" for their operations, according to new advice from Forrester Research.

Without a well defined environmental baseline, IT leaders will not be able to respond effectively to demands to "go green" and will not be able to invest effectively.

Most IT staff would steal sensitive company information, including CEO's passwords and customer details, if they were laid off, according to a new survey from Cyber-Ark.

A staggering 88 percent of IT administrators admitted they would take corporate secrets, if they were suddenly made redundant. The target information included CEO passwords, customer database, research and development plans, financial reports, M&A plans and the company's list of privileged passwords.

Security applications delivered as cloud-based services will more than triple by 2013, according to Gartner.

The firm said 20 percent of the revenue of messaging security tools, such as antimalware and antispam services for email and instant messaging, currently comes through the cloud delivery model. But this will jump to 60 percent by 2013.

Enterprise architects should use the current economic uncertainty to push business unit executives into genuine collaboration, according to a new paper from Forrester.

The analyst group has warned enterprise architects to anticipate the impact of the economic slowdown and start refining their assumptions and goals.