Todd R. Weiss

The rapid-fire spread of mobile devices being used by enterprise employees can be a huge boon for businesses in productivity and customer service gains, but those advantages don't come without a price.

The inherent flexibility and freedom to get business done anywhere, anytime, also makes it much harder to maintain the security and control of corporate data when employees are accessing and storing business information on their smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices. And the rush of new devices never seems to end, making it hard to stay out in front of innovations.

Preventing external attacks to IT systems is a huge and critical task for most companies, but what are businesses doing to stop similar attacks when they come from within? That's a question that more companies should be asking themselves as internal IT sabotage cases regularly hit businesses hard, causing big monetary losses and often knocking companies offline for days or weeks.

Earlier this week, a 37-year-old former IT staff member for the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese drug company, Shionogi, pleaded guilty to remotely infiltrating and sabotaging the company's IT infrastructure this past February. The damage scrambled the company's operations for days and cost Shionogi more than $800,000 in damages, according to IDG News Service.

CIO — It's not budgets, technology issues or strategic worries that are creating roadblocks for cloud projects in many enterprises. Instead, deep-seated fears of change and requirements for more cloud education are keeping many enterprises from moving forward.

That's the conclusion of a new cloud computing study from TheInfoPro, a division of The 451 Group, which found that 52 percent of 109 medium to large enterprise respondents believed that changes are needed in these attitudes for their cloud plans to achieve real success.

Companies of every kind are beginning to focus more on consumers and engaging with them on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. But the successful businesses, the ones that want to really make their social media efforts sing, are going beyond just gaining that simple visibility.

What those smart companies are doing, says Denis Pombriant, a Social CRM analyst with Beagle Research Group LLC, is turning their social media efforts into two-way, real-time communications with their customers.

Today we all use our smartphones and our broadband-equipped home and work PCs to instantly access information and data on just about any topic via the Internet.

But have you ever taken a few moments to realize how far we've come since our first forays online? Were you among those who tried it in 1994 or 1995 when the Internet was in its nascent stages for home users?

We take the Internet for granted now, but a lot of developments helped to make it the gargantuan shopping, socializing, commerce-helping, video-sharing behemoth what it is today.

In this two-part retrospective, we didn't try to re-create the history of the Internet. Instead, we focused on online events that were game-changers when they occurred. For our discussion of earlier milestones (1978 through part of 1996), read "20 Game-Changing Events That Shaped the Internet, Part 1."

Some buyers don't realize that many big-ticket items, such as HDTVs, don't come with everything they need in the box. Even worse, retailers often price these minor--yet completely necessary--accessories in the stratosphere.

With that in mind, here's our list of 10 tech accessories you're paying too much for (it's also our list of things that you should never have had to buy separately in the first place), and some thoughts on how you can still get all of the extras you require without breaking the bank.

A California woman last week sued Apple in state Superior Court, claiming that last summer's iOS 4.0 upgrade turned her iPhone into an "iBrick" that was slower and less reliable than before the update.

Bianca Wofford of San Diego County, Calif., who filed the lawsuit Oct. 29, has asked a judge to grant her case class-action status, which if awarded, would let any California resident join the suit.

This is a true story about sex, computers, the Internet, spying, theft, intrigue, and the police--and it all began this past February when David Krop made the mistake of leaving his two laptop computers inside a locked SUV in a parking garage.

While Krop, 41, attended a brief business meeting in downtown Miami Beach, Florida, a smash-and-grab thief stole the two laptops, a Toshiba and an Apple Macbook. When he returned to his SUV, Krop saw the shattered passenger window and realized that his computers were gone.

These days, if you want to watch over your house, your kids or your significant other, there's a whole world of high-tech security devices out there you can use, in forms you may not have even imagined.

There are tiny GPS data loggers you can slip into someone's car or backpack to learn where they're going. There are audio recorders the size of flash drives that can listen in and preserve the conversations of others nearby. And there are surveillance cams in a whole assortment of motion-activated disguises, including facial tissue dispensers, alarm clocks, outdoor home electrical boxes, bird feeders and even soft, furry teddy bears.