6. , and : If the swine-flu pandemic leads to a lot of employees telecommuting when they feel well enough to work but not quite well enough to commute network problems could ensue, analyst firm Gartner said, echoing a U.S. Government Accountability Office report that said federal agencies are not prepared in that event. In other IT news related to the novel H1N1 virus, Harvard Medical School has developed an iPhone app that disseminates information about the flu and scammers are taking advantage of the pandemic to try to lure people into schemes.

7. , and : We thought we'd lump the these security stories together because they all fall under the heading of things that companies will not do or that you, as an Internet user, should not do. Facebook will not contact you, unsolicited, out of the blue to say that it has reset your password. If you are a Twitter user and you receive a weird direct message that wants you to go to a Twitter log-in page, you should not provide your log-in information -- it's a scam! And, finally, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. does not contact individual bank users to tell them that their banks have failed. The FDIC never sends unsolicited e-mail and its URL does not end with what is obviously another domain name. Following the link will download a Trojan that turns your computer into a bot.

8. : The stunning news of the week was a Wall Street Journal report that former Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz allegedly shared confidential information with a Wall Street trader involved in an insider-trading scandal.

9. : Another round from the story that refuses to go away -- Yahoo and Microsoft have not been able to finalize their ad-search deal by a set deadline, so they have extended the deadline for an unspecified period. (There's a trick we would like to try with some of our deadlines.)

10. and : Oh, to be sure there was other IT news this week of note, but Saturday is Halloween and we're in the mood for a little fun. So were ITWorld, which assembled 10 entertaining "geek" costumes, and Network World, which put together a treat bag for readers.