Features

• New regulations will soon swell IT workloads

  The financial meltdown, fueled by a decade of exotic financing mechanisms that some say were designed to hide risk and pass it on to unwary buyers, will have a major impact on IT budgets, personnel, and reporting responsibilities. New regulations will put IT in the hot seat, much as the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley and other such rules did in the early 2000s as governments responded to that period's financial shenanigans.

• New obscenity charges raise questions in Internet Age

  A long-standing court test using community standards to determine whether adult content is criminally obscene has been a potential problem area for the US pornography industry. But a debate that's been largely abstract for years has recently changed as the US Department of Justice successfully prosecuted two Web site operators for obscenity.

• The three business tech risks you don't know about

  Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when traveling to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because US Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth US Circuit Court ruling in April.