Here’s the latest sign that businesses are losing the tech security fight: The bad guys are starting to steal from one another.

That could sound like a good thing–better that hackers and other cyber criminals squabble among themselves than attack innocent businesses and consumers–but it really isn’t. This internecine theft isn’t the online version of a gangland fight to the death. Rather, veteran criminals are finding ways to take credit card numbers and other information from newbie crooks, Billy Rios, a security engineer at Microsoft who spends his free time researching the cyber black market, tells the Business Technology Blog.

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A judge in the U.S. ruled Monday that eBay isn’t responsible for identifying counterfeit goods sold on its Web site, a decision that came just two weeks after a judge in France ruled the opposite was true. It’s another reminder that the law hasn’t kept pace with the Internet.

The Internet is a global network. But it isn’t governed by one global law–it’s subject to many local and regional laws. The result is that in some countries it’s legal to do things online–like some forms of computer hacking–that are illegal in others.

On the surface, it seems impossible to force a business based in one country to accommodate dozens of country-specific laws when it comes to the Internet. Unlike, say, shipping a product between countries, which is the result of a strategic decision to manufacture or sell a product somewhere, business can’t control where people are visiting a Web site from. In many cases, a business won’t even have employees or an office in that country.

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Hackers enjoy a reputation as computer whizzes who can break into the most sophisticated systems. They may be whizzes, but the reason for their success is that businesses rely on defenses filled with holes big enough to drive a truck through.

A new study by Verizon’s Business Risk team, which performs post-breach forensics, looked at the causes of more than 500 data-loss incidents and concluded that sloppy security procedures were partly to blame in almost every one.

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We all know men hate to ask for directions. Apparently they loathe putting directions in computer code, too.

Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

The code becomes a type of “roadmap” for others who might want to alter it or add to it later, says McGrattan, a native of Ireland who has been with Ingres since 1992.

Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses.

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Large tech companies turn their annual conferences into lavish affairs featuring high-quality gifts for attendees and concerts by big-name rock stars. But lately an unplanned giveaway has stolen some headlines: the flu.

The San Francisco Department of Public Heath this week warned of an outbreak of the Norovirus at the Moscone Center, where Sun Microsystems is currently hosting the JavaOne conference. The Norovirus is a highly contagious flu-like virus that causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and some stomach cramping. A spokesman for the city tells the Business Technology Blog that the warning came after the public-health department received several complaints from attendees at Sun’s conference.

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Software giant SAP is getting sued for failing to deliver an “out-of-the-box integrated end-to-end solution that increases … effectiveness.” Amazingly, the meaning of these buzzwords may cost SAP over $100 million.

This blog’s hatred of tech jargon is no secret: We think that more people would be interested in technology if insiders didn’t describe the stuff in a made-up language. Despite our protests, the tech industry refuses to abandon these terms. Maybe the threat of legal action will scare it straight.

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Want to know who a business is hiring and promoting? Starting Friday, LinkedIn will tell you, showing that not even the company launching the disruptive service is immune to the challenges the Internet presents in the process.

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With apologies to Harvard graduates, who found out yesterday that a hacker stole their personal information from the school and eventually made it available over a popular file-trading network, today’s dose of security news (and a little fear-mongering) is going to focus on China.

Over the last several years, it’s become increasingly clear that many cyber attacks–particularly ones targeting the government–originate in China. The extent to which the Chinese government is involved is a matter of debate.

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The number of students enrolling in computer-science programs dropped when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. You might expect enrollment to shoot back up now that the Web 2.0 renaissance is minting a new round of techie millionaires.

You’d be wrong: The number of students receiving undergraduate computer-science degrees is the lowest it’s been for the last 10 years, according to the Computing Research Association. (It could be longer; that’s as far back as the data released by the CRA goes.)

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Microsoft must respond “quickly and decisively” to the threat that online software poses to its business, wrote Microsoft’s chief software architect in an internal memo. That was two and a half years ago. To date, Microsoft’s efforts to develop Internet-based versions of the software it sells to businesses have been anything but decisive, leaving cynics to wonder whether the company is committed to the shift.

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The line between software that people access over the Internet and software that resides on their PCs will blur over the next several years, as an announcement from Adobe reminds us.

Adobe today introduced AIR, an application that lets people access Web sites even when they aren’t online. Someone who wants to put an item up for bid on eBay, for example, could fill out the form through the AIR software while the PC isn’t connected to the Web. The software would automatically post the information to eBay the next time the computer is connected to the Internet.

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Just when we thought that tech was going mainstream, we discovered that Angelina Jolie doesn’t read the Business Technology blog.

The actress starred in the 1995 cyber-thriller “Hackers,” and has played several tech-savvy characters, notably the video-game heroine Lara Croft and super assassin Mrs. Smith. Computer villains have also used her visage to push their viruses and other malicious code. So we always held out hope that Angelina was a closet geek. And maybe, just maybe, she was interested enough in the way technology was changing things for the average worker that she visited our little corner of cyberspace on occasion.

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You might think that all the attention data breaches and cyber attacks have received would make workers who access corporate systems from outside the office more cautious. You’d be wrong. Not only do remote workers engage in risky behavior, but they’re doing so at an increasing rate.

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As if hockey ability, Celine Dion and a (slightly) more-valuable currency weren’t enough to make Americans jealous of Canadians: One Canadian government agency is instituting a BlackBerry blackout.

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Everybody knows the story by now: Tech budgets aren’t growing as fast as they have in the past as companies try to weather a stormy economy. But there’s one bright spot in this otherwise cloudy forecast: Businesses will boost the amount they spend on supply-chain management technology by 15% this year.

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