Top 10: Naughty workers, spam pollutes, Skype spin off

A whole lot of employees keep "inappropriate" photos, videos and browser cache links on their work laptops, a survey found. (Honestly, how difficult is it to at least clean out the cache?) As if that's not enough, the spam that clogs our computers is spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to McAfee. And eBay plans to spin off Skype after figuring out what many observers said a while ago, which is that they just do not seem to have much in common.

1. Survey: 7 of 10 IT pros have found sexual, other inappropriate material on employees' laptops: Almost three quarters of 3,100 U.S. corporate security and IT professionals surveyed by the Ponemon Institute said that they had discovered "inappropriate" pictures, videos or browser cache links on work-issued laptops. Two-thirds have found "evidence of inappropriate interactions with other employees." Naughty behavior aside, we're not so sure that keeping a copy of a resume on a work-issued laptop is evidence that an employee is looking for a new job (63 percent of the IT pros had found resumes on work laptops along with what was described as other evidence of job searches). Some of us occasionally are asked to provide a resume for other reasons, you know? Any event, the apparently tawdry computer activity makes companies more susceptible to security breaches and that's no good at all.

2. EBay to spin off Skype by mid-2010 and How the Skype spin off could change the market: EBay wants to spin off Skype by the middle of next year, affirming the opinion expressed by many when eBay bought Skype in 2005 for US$2.6 billion that the two just did not make a good fit.

3. Spam e-mails killing the environment, McAfee report says: Spam e-mail is choking the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, McAfee said in a report. The estimated 62 trillion spam messages sent each year spew as much carbon dioxide into the air as 3.1 million cars using 2 billion gallons of gas, according to McAfee. The fact that the report failed to estimate the daily energy usage of, say, PCs and servers, or the energy used by other applications made it difficult to put the report's numbers into context, which drew a lot of snarky comments at various news sites that ran stories about the findings.

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