HP's Dunn resigns; Schwartz to investigate HP pretexting

According to the SF Chronicle, the departure of Hewlett-Packard's Patricia Dunn and the other moves announced by the company on September 22 come as concerns mount that Mark Hurd and HP have not been entirely truthful in their earlier claims that top officials were made aware of the use of false identities in the HP probe only recently. Hurd said he knew of plans to send false information to journalists ["pretexting"] in an effort to find out which HP board members were leaking sensitive information to the press. But Hurd said he wasn't sure he remembered everything about how the plan was to be carried out.

Hurd said Hewlett-Packard would appoint Bart M. Schwartz, a former federal prosecutor, as counsel, to perform an independent review of HP's investigative methods and the company's Standards of Business Conduct processes. Schwartz will report to Hurd and to Bob Wayman, HP's chief financial officer. At the news conference on Sept. 22, Hurd was accompanied by lawyers from Morgan Lewis & Bockius, hired by HP to investigate the scandal.

As noted in IPBiz, the February 10, 06 issue of Science announced that Stanford's John I. Brauman will head an external panel investigating how the [fraudulent] papers of Hwang Woo Suk on embryonic stem cells were handled by Science. Science did not actually say the results would be made public, and so far they have not been made public.

Separately, my paper on Science's inaccurate reporting on patent continuations will be coming out soon.