It’s a holiday weekend here in the U.S. We all know what that means: extra work doing family tech support. Mom and Dad, Grandma and Aunt Lucy have all saved up their dumbest and most annoying tech support problems, just waiting for you to arrive and fix them. But, in the spirit of the Memorial Day, we’ll take pity on all our readers who are in the trenches of the tech support war. For a short time, we’ll waive our usual site-license fee and sign up your company, group, school, or organization en mass to DominoPower at no charge.

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There are many issues to consider when ulletproofing and securing SOA (service oriented architectures), including today’s most commonly posed problems of security and quality. By ignoring security and quality in the development cycle corporations risk exposing themselves to a multitude of risks that will further hinder them throughout the services lifecycle. Several keys exist in the SOA and Web services lifecycle, but it boils down to a list of five keys to avoid security, reliability and compliance issues.

Days after a massive data leak potentially affecting more than 26 million American veterans became public, a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved a bill requiring written notice of information security breaches. By a voice vote Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee adopted a bill that would require businesses to alert customers about security breaches. The panel also glued on a newly drafted amendment that would apply to federal agencies. But in a bizarre twist, the legislation regulates the private sector far more stringently than government agencies–even though the Veterans Administration was responsible for one of the largest security breaches in history, one which officials now say could cost $500 million to clean up.

Sacred Heart University is the latest school to be victimized by hackers, according to a message posted on the school’s Web site. The Fairfield, Conn.-based university said in the posting that it discovered the intrusion on May 8 and notified police and the FBI, which have launched investigations. Sacred Heart offered no details on when the hackers may have entered the system or the kind of information that may have been exposed.

Former Enron chief executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were found guilty on Thursday of lying about their company’s crumbling finances in one of the biggest U.S. business scandals and could face years in prison. The jury verdict in a trial that began January 30 capped a four-year-long government effort to get those responsible for a corporate collapse that cost investors billions of dollars, wiped out thousands of jobs and sent shockwaves through Wall Street and Washington.

Symantec’s leading antivirus software, which protects some of the world’s largest corporations and U.S. government agencies, suffers from a flaw that lets hackers seize control of computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious programs, researchers said Thursday. Symantec said it was investigating the issue but could not immediately corroborate the vulnerability.

Computer maker Lenovo reported a quarterly loss that was almost double analysts forecasts, blaming costs linked to its $1.25 billion purchase of IBM’s PC arm in 2005 and sending its shares down sharply. Shares in Lenovo Group Ltd., the industry’s number-three player, fell as much as 8 percent, before bouncing back somewhat, after the company posted disappointing fourth quarter and fiscal full-year earnings on Thursday.

Software piracy resulted in a loss of $34 billion worldwide in 2005, a $1.6 billion increase over 2004, according to a study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance. The study, conducted by information-technology research firm IDC, found that roughly one out of every three copies of personal computing software installed in 2005 was pirated. While the rate of piracy has fluctuated from country to country, globally it has remained steady since 2004.

IBM gained ground on rivals Dell and Hewlett-Packard in the server market during the first quarter, according to research released Tuesday by Gartner. IBM’s unit shipments grew by 19.3 percent during the quarter, faster than the overall pace of the market, while Dell and HP trailed the pace. Overall shipments grew 13.7 percent compared with last year’s first quarter, but revenue was flat, Gartner said. During the fourth quarter, shipments grew 12.7 percent but revenue was up 4.5 percent.

For the last fifteen years, some commentators have predicted the demise of the mainframe, as customers move away from mainframes to Wintel or Linux/Unix platforms; and for fifteen years, for very good reasons, mainframe users have failed to do so. Nevertheless, over the same fifteen years, non-mainframe platforms have steadily eroded the mainframe’s advantages in performance, scalability, and robustness, while maintaining their strengths in open flexibility that leads to easier incorporation of new technology, and claiming advantages in TCO. Do these facts make migration a better idea today? Or does the question not arise, because migration is too difficult to perform?