Every month seems to bring another episode of sensitive personal information escaping into the wild because a corporate or government laptop computer is lost or stolen. A common response is a lot of hand-wringing over how the data should have been encrypted. But some key questions usually go unanswered. Why is so much private data allowed to be on laptops to begin with? What do people do all day that compels them to tote around records on, say, 26 million Americans, the staggering number seen in the recent Veterans Affairs case? "It’s pure laziness. There’s actually no excuse for it," said Avivah Litan, a security analyst for Gartner Inc. "There’s no good business reason for it."

The Chicago and Boston metro areas have shown the biggest gains in IT job postings since the beginning of 2006, according to the monthly report released July 11 from Dice.com, a career site for tech professionals. Chicago and Boston have increased their number of tech jobs available 26.6 percent and 35.4 percent respectively since January, and 116 and 274 new jobs respectively since June.

CA has announced that it is acquiring XOsoft, a disaster recovery software maker, to expand its data protection and management services. XOsoft’s technology will allow CA to offer additional security, backup and recovery tools, CA said Tuesday. XOsoft offers recovery management products used to minimize the amount of time applications are down and aim to help companies recover data with minimal loss.

In the latest in a string of high-profile data disclosures, the brokerage services group of ADP (Automatic Data Processing) last week said "an unauthorized party impersonated officers" at an undisclosed number of public companies to obtain investor information between November 2005 and February 2006. The company, based in Roseland, N.J., did not say how many companies or investors were affected.

The State Department is recovering from large-scale computer break-ins worldwide over the past several weeks that appeared to target its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, The Associated Press has learned. Investigators believe hackers stole sensitive U.S. information and passwords and implanted backdoors in unclassified government computers to allow them to return at will, said U.S. officials familiar with the hacking.

Tsarfin Computing announced the availability of IPMonitor version 5.9, the company’s flagship product in the network monitoring software market. IPMonitor is a sophisticated network monitoring solution that allows network administrators, Web masters, and Internet service providers to monitor any networked device on the Internet, corporate intranet, or TCP/IP LAN and receive alerts immediately via audible alarm, message, email, or third-party software when a connection fails. An essential addition to any network administrator’s personal toolkits, IPMonitor allows users to tailor it to their particular area of responsibility, from a single server to a small-office LAN to hundreds of devices within a large corporate network.

Sun Microsystems plans to launch the second phase of its x86 server line, three higher-end models that show the company’s commitment to and ambitions for the market. When the company unveiled its "Galaxy" line of Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron-based x86 servers in September, it began with mainstream models with sockets for two processors. The new systems, though, venture much farther afield.

Business software giant SAP has acquired Praxis Software Solutions as it attempts to weave on-demand applications into its offerings. Technology from Praxis will be incorporated into SAP Business One, a business management product aimed at small and midsize companies, to help them set up online stores and deploy customer relationship management (CRM) software via the Internet.

Security researchers at software maker MessageLabs contend that malware writers, hackers and other cyber-criminals are combining multiple forms of IT threats in an attempt to amplify their efforts. In the company’s latest IT security intelligence report, MessageLabs experts said that criminals are converging their attacks across multiple communications channels, such as e-mail, instant messaging networks and Web sites, and are also pulling together information-gathering techniques, including spyware, spam and phishing schemes, as they seek new ways to menace businesses and consumers.

Way back in the June 2003 issue of DominoPower, http://www.dominopower.com/tocs/issue200306.html, we said that ##Lotus should do a Linux Lotus Notes client.## Well, maybe they listened to us, along with everyone else who has nagged at them, and now they are going to do a Linux Lotus Notes client. A real Notes client, not a Linux plug-in for Eclipse, a full (well almost) function Lotus Notes stand-alone client running on Linux. Well done, Lotus. Can we start asking for Designer, now? See Ed Brill’s blog at www.edbrill.com, and sometime soon, I guess, Lotus’s home page will be updated.–Mick Moignard, DominoPower Senior Technical Editor