Identity thieves know no boundaries. They even go after one of the most vulnerable groups: children. "Children are not in any condition to protect themselves," said Adam Levin, chairman and co-founder of Identity Theft 911, which provides identity-theft products and helps victims of the crime. "It’s up to their parents."

Children are especially enticing targets for identity-theft crooks because it can take years before the crime is discovered. Statistics on child identity theft are hard to pin down.

IT managers around the U.S. are falling in love with SSDs (solid-state drives) in enterprise servers because they solve two major headaches: they run so fast they can replace multiple HDDs (hard disk drives), and they help reduce the electric bill.

The benefits of SSDs, which are made from flash memory chips and have no moving parts, are even helping many IT managers get over their initial sticker shock, says Jim Handy, lead storage analyst at Objective Analysis.

Effective online communication relies on your ability to reach customers. If your email or newsletters are listed on a spam blacklist, the messages won’t get through. Here are several common mistakes that put business communication at risk.

Gmail users, including those who use it for work as part of the Google Apps hosted suite, are again reporting problems accessing the service. Reports started streaming into the official Gmail and Google Apps discussion forums on Thursday and continued Friday morning.

It’s the third time in the past two weeks that Gmail users have been locked out of their accounts due to the "502 Server Error" login problem.

The August 1 Bureau of Labor Statistics employment situation report included the kind of gloom-and-doom that has become de riguer in this recessionary cycle: nonfarm payroll employment slipped by 51,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate rose to 5.7, a full one percent increase in the last 12 months.

But buried within the report were some statistical punches that seemed aimed right for the technology gut: Employment in the information industry declined by 13,000 in July and by 44,000 over the past 12 months. Telecommunications alone lost 5,000 jobs in July.

Every year since we started DominoPower, one or more of our most respected contributors have declared either Notes or Domino to be dead. It’s gotten so that we can almost set our clocks by the damning declarations. Our experience, however, has been that the Lotus market is prospering. In any case, it’s time for another view into doom and gloom by Ron Herardian, one of our most prolific contributors. Is he right? Let us know what you think. Needless to say, Ron’s opinions are not those of DominoPower, its editors, ZATZ Publishing, or anyone who loves chocolate.

Read this DominoPower article.

Canadian researchers have come up with a novel solution to the perennial problem of stupidly insecure passwords–create secure ones using images, MP3 files or videos. Mohammad Mannan and P.C. van Oorschot of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, have come up with ObPwd (object-based password), a way of creating complex, random passwords from SHA-1-based hashes generated using a range of image and sound file types as input.

Instead of using the easy-to-guess name of a pet cat as the password, the user could use a picture of the same animal to generate something sophisticated enough to withstand even the best password cracking tools. Getting round the technology would mean having to have access to the specific image or file from which the password was generated.

Hackers believed to be behind the CNN-spam campaign have changed tactics slightly–they are now using messages claiming to be from news network MSNBC.

The best advice for users–be careful what you click. The spoofed MSNBC messages try to entice victims with provocative subject heads, such as "msnbc.com–BREAKING NEWS: McCain told lies to win votes" and "msnbc.com–BREAKING NEWS: Jerry Yang relinquishes control over Yahoo."

Google Gmail and Google Apps went dark this past week, creating a firestorm of fury among those using the messaging and collaboration software to communicate or use one of their key enterprise applications. What does it mean when your hosted infrastructure collapses? Analysts from IDC, Forrester Research, Ferris Research and Burton Group weigh in with their thoughts on what the outages mean for Google and the SAAS/cloud computing space at large.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he’sfed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they’re hyped by security people.

Torvalds explained his position in an email exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.