Computerworld, Joris Evers, 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.

True privacy can be hard to come by in the socially enabled online world, but Twitter on Thursday announced that it has joined Firefox maker Mozilla in taking a big step forward for users.

Specifically, the popular microblogging site has signed onto enabling Firefox's Do Not Track feature, making it possible for Firefox users on Twitter to opt out of third-party tracking cookies used for advertising and other purposes.

Executives at AstraZeneca, a global pharmaceutical company, know that it's not enough to provide social collaboration tools for their employees. Those tools need to be highly mobile.

Employees are likely to be happy to get enterprise-level social collaboration tools, but they are just as likely to be frustrated if those tools aren't highly mobile, said Angela Yochem, chief technology officer at AstraZeneca, which has 57,200 employees in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Leap Day brought with it the chance to download the beta release of the next version of Microsoft's server platform, along with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and first looks at the next versions of the company's developer software. Then, this morning, Microsoft announced the new features and enhancements that have made it into the server beta, which you can download here .

I've spent some time putting the beta through its paces in my test environment. I used a Dell PowerEdge T300 with a 2.5-Ghz Intel Xeon processor and 24GB of RAM, and tested with both a native installation and as a virtual machine within Windows Server 2008 R2's Hyper-V platform.

Kim Dotcom and the other MegaUpload defendants may have to wait until Wednesday to find out if they can be released on bail.

District Court Judge David McNaughton has reserved his decision until tomorrow or possibly Wednesday. Until then, the defendants will remain in custody at Mount Eden remand center in Albany, New Zealand.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is considered a significant flight risk, New Zealand prosecutors argued on behalf of the U.S. government Monday in a New Zealand court.

The North Shore District Court scheduled a hearing to decide whether Dotcom and three others should be granted bail after four men were arrested in Auckland on Friday on suspicion of large-scale copyright infringement.

The Internet can promote the literacy development of young adults, according to a study by Dr Jen Scott Curwood from the University of Sydney, Australia.

The ongoing study, which interviewed teenagers aged 13 to 17 from Australia, Canada, and the United States, found that the Web -- in moderation -- could be an effective tool in fostering literacy skills among youths.

Google will inject US$300 million as a long-term investment in its Hong Kong datacenter that will go live in early 2013, said the company after the ground breaking ceremony in Tsueng Kwan O Industrial Estate last week.

The US$300 million investment includes the cost of land, construction, and technical equipment, Google representatives noted, adding that it will employ around 25 full-time staffers along with some part-time and full-time contractors in various roles including compute technicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, and catering and security workers.

In April of 1995, Steve Jobs, then head of NeXT Computer, was interviewed as part of the Computerworld Honors Program Oral History project. The wide-ranging interview was conducted by Daniel Morrow, executive director of the awards program.

From his early years -- when he says except for a few key adults 'I would absolutely have ended up in jail' -- to how he felt about Apple in the mid-'90s -- 'The Macintosh will die in another few years [under John Sculley]' -- to his predictions about how the Internet would change the world, this is a rare look at Jobs after his first string of innovations but before he returned to Apple.

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.