This week, the HP vice president indicted for leaking trade secrets from IBM, his former employeer, pleaded guilty. Dude, UR DOIN IT RONG. Atul Malhotra allegedly emailed the goods to a coworker, drawing a big red arrow back to his own forehead. Ready to cash in on your inside info? Follow this six-step plan.

Even as the New York Times staffs up its technology bureau, the Wall Street Journal is cutting back — at least on some of its higher-priced names. Among the names of layoff victims supplied by a tipster: Jason Fry, online Real Time columnist, and George Anders, author of Perfect Enough, the definitive business biography of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

Tech workers looking for cash are selling information about vulnerabilities in their own companies' products, according to a report in Fast Company by investigative journalist Adam Penenberg. (For the Olds, Penenberg is the guy who busted hacker-hoax writer Stephen Glass ten years ago. Yes, ten years. We are OLDZ.) Penenberg got Hewlett-Packard to admit they'd been compromised by "a rogue employee in France," then tracked down the guy he believes bought the info: An instructor at Paris's Institut Supérieur d'Electronique.

Click to viewBenchmark-backed Glassdoor.com popped out of stealth mode as a site that lets users find out what employees think of their employers. As a part of the ratings, company CEO's get a grade. Some, such as Cisco's John T. Chambers and Apple's Steve Jobs fared very well — coming away with 93 percent and 95 percent approval ratings. Others, including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, did not. The ten worst-rated CEO's and what employees told Glassdoor they think about them, below.

Deutsche Telekom, the dominant telephone and communications provider in Germany, has been caught using private phone records in a scandal reminiscent of Hewlett-Packard's industrial espionage. During a spell of layoffs in 2005 and 2006, the company hired a data-mining firm to scan the records of supervisory board members in the hopes of matching the numbers to those of journalists as it looked for the source of leaks about the company's downsizing. New CEO René: Obermann wasn't there at the time, but is stuck cleaning up the mess. [NY Times] (Photo by AP/Frank Augstein)

Sales at Hewlett-Packard grew 11 percent, year-over-year in the second quarter, to $28.26 billion. Notebook sales jumped 31 percent, while earnings in its cash-cow printer unit were flat. [WSJ]

Its pretexting heyday may be over, but HP is apparently still not adverse to a little telephone trickery, as its pending patent for Text-to-Speech Conversion with Associated Mood Tag shows. In it, HP touts the use of VoiceXML to have a fake 18-year-old salesgirl register her disgust with customers who don't respond to offers.

The culture at Hewlett-Packard, according to the Wall Street Journal, "is considered more of a consensus-building style." You know — lots of meetings and executives who give time and consideration to each other's very important ideas. Meanwhile, the man who runs EDS, the tech-services outfit HP is buying for $13 billion, likes to fire people who don't agree with him. He's Ronald Rittenmeyer, "a high-control, results-oriented, very focused leader," a rival CEO told the Journal. Rittenmeyer, this CEO said, "is exactly what you want in a senior leader" — whether HP colleagues like it or not.

Hewlett-Packard has software to automate datacenters; EDS has datacenters which need automating. That's part of the logic behind HP's $13.9 billion acquisition of the tech-services business. The deal proves that Marc Andreessen is prescient. After he sold Netscape to AOL, Andreessen launched LoudCloud, a website-hosting business powered by advanced software. In the wake of the bust, Andreessen sold the hosting part of the business to EDS, and relaunched the company as Opsware, the name of its automation software. HP bought Opsware last year. While reuniting LoudCloud's constituent parts isn't the reason why Mark Hurd is doing the deal, he is proving that Andreessen's early vision of combining software and services was on the money. Timing is everything.

Hewlett-Packard will acquire Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for $25 a share, doubling the size of HP's services unit and making it the second largest company in the space after IBM. Both company boards have unanimously approved the deal, which should close in the second half of next year. [WSJ]

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hewlett-Packard is nearing a deal to buy EDS for $12 billion to $13 billion. Having set Dell back on its heels in PC sales, HP is now moving to challenge IBM. As computers become commodities, the money is in installing and maintaining them, not marking up Intel's microprocessors and Microsoft's operating system for a thin margin. One wonders if Michael Dell is gutsy enough to launch a rival bid — or, with HP now worth three times as much as Dell, if he can really afford to.

Apple updated its iMacs today with a new processor from Intel that's not supposed to be available for another 45 days yet. It's not the first time Intel gave Steve Jobs first dibs. A year ago, new iMacs came out with an Intel 3.0-GHz quad-core processor that HP and Dell had to wait on.

Former Hewlett-Packard VP of marketing Gene Wang rocked the political world with his booty-shaking debut, "Hillary 4 U and Me." Now Wang is back with hip-hop anthem "Hillary in The House" and he's taking all comers, especially "y'all in the blogosphere" :

Okay, it's not one of the sexy Porsches, but it's a Porsche nonetheless — with only 53,500 miles on it! The sports car is part of an asset auction being held tomorrow at 11 for Mendocino Software, a former supplier of data backup and recovery systems with clients that included Hewlett-Packard. The company burned through $33 million in five years before shuttering last month. I imagine CEO Kathleen Holmgren and chairman Steve Colman driving back to the company in the vehicle — apparently company-owned — after yet another VC turned them down for another round of funding. Prospective buyers will have to remove the stench of flop sweat from the interior themselves.

HP posted a 38 percent jump in net income, amid cost cutting and strong demand for its PCs. Sales climbed to $28.47 billion. HP also boosted its outlook. The company hired 2,000 salespeople in the last year. [Barrons]

Hewlett-Packard has acquired Israeli printer manufacturer NUR Macroprinters for $117.5 million. This is HP's second purchase in three months of an industrial printer maker, a sign that HP may be hedging its bets on the consumer side of the printing business. [WSJ]

Hewlett-Packard earned $2.16 billion on $28.3 billion in revenue in the quarter ending October 31. This was $1 billion more than Wall Street analysts expected. A billion here, a billion there, and before you know it, you're kicking Dell in the nuts. [AP]

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has signed on to be a Fox Business Network contributor. According to the press release, Fiorina achieved the highest rate of innovation in company history. How they measure that metric is a mystery to us; after all, shortly after Fiorina left, the company engaged in some highly innovative leak-detection practices, leading to the resignation of several board members. But never mind that. The only stat that will likely matter to Fox's Joe-Sixpack audience, sadly, is how short her skirt is.

Sony's photo-sharing site, ImageStation, is quickly following in its sister music site Connect's footsteps, dancing itself out of business, and is closing in February 2008. Meant to boost use of its Cyber-shot digital camera line, ImageStation failed to compete with the likes of Yahoo's Flickr, and its users are having their albums shuffled off to Shutterfly, one of the few remaining independent photo sites. (Kodak bought Ofoto, and HP, another camera maker, owns Snapfish.) ImageStation's failure is not much of a surprise, considering Sony has proven itself, time and again, incapable of coding its way out of a paper bag. Aside from the videogame business, where it has a thriving in-house development studio building games for its PlayStation consoles, Sony has repeatedly bungled all of its efforts to tie together its gadgets with software and websites. A suggestion to CEO Howard Stringer: Stick to to what we know and love your company for — that is, really swank HDTVs.