Forget about teaching computer users how to be safe online. Users are often called the weakest link in computer security. They can’t select secure passwords, and they write down passwords and give them out to strangers in exchange for treats. They use old or outdated security software, can’t spell the word "phishing," and click on all links that arrive in e-mail or instant messages, and all that appear on the Web. That’s the reality, Stefan Gorling, a doctoral student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, said in a talk at the Virus Bulletin conference. The solution, many technologists say, is to educate the user about online threats. But that doesn’t work and is the wrong approach, Gorling said.

IBM announced new marketing benefits, business services and incentives for its growing SOA Business Partner community. The IBM Service Oriented Architecture Partner Program, formalized in June 2005 with 50 Business Partner members, has grown to 2,500 members that take advantage of IBM software, services, tools and education to help their customers embrace SOA. A new initiative, "Ready for SOA," provides incentives for members in the IBM Business Partner SOA Specialty program. These Business Partners have demonstrated full support of the IBM SOA Foundation–IBM’s set of standards-based software, best practices and patterns for deploying SOAs–and have met the rigorous business and technical requirements for invitation to the specialty. In exchange, Business Partners in the SOA specialty receive technical enablement, support, and a skills-building roadmap to access the growing SOA market opportunity.

Oracle plans to make a significant change to the way product flaws are described in its security bulletins, an admission of sorts that the quarterly alerts were almost impossible to understand. Beginning with the Oct. 17 release of the scheduled CPU (Critical Patch Update), the Redwood Shores, Calif., database vendor will start adding severity scores to the bulletins along with an executive summary of the flaws being patched and a new section highlighting bugs that are remotely exploitable without authentication credentials.

IBM has added enterprise blogging capability to its venerable Lotus Notes/Domino e-mail and collaboration software in an incremental update available now. In Lotus Notes and Domino Version 7.0.2, an update IBM announced Wednesday, the company has added the ability to install log templates on the Domino database. With them, enterprise employees can create, design and update Web logs working within Notes, said Alan Lepofsky, a manager in marketing intelligence and communications for IBM.

Ray Noorda, founder and former chief executive of Novell and a pioneer of network computing, died on Monday at the age of 82 due to complications associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The Novell founder became chief executive officer in 1983, at which time he and the firm revolutionized the way computers connect via networks and employ group resources, such as printers and shared drives.

IBM plans to crank up the speed on its Power6 server chip to 5.0GHz, far higher than competing processors from Intel and Sun Microsystems. Despite its high frequency, the chip will avoid overheating through its small, 65-nanometer process geometry, high-bandwidth buses running as fast as 75GB per second, and voltage thresholds as low as 0.8 volts, IBM said.

A hacker broke into Google’s main official blog and posted a false message on Saturday, saying that the company had decided to cancel a joint project with eBay. The intrusion marks the second time this year that Google’s official blog has fallen into unauthorized hands. In March, Google staffers deleted the so-called Google Blog by mistake and someone briefly took control of the Web address.

CNET announced the acquisition of silicon.de GmbH, a business-to-business information service for information technology decision makers. The transaction closed on October 1st, 2006. Financial terms were not disclosed. Headquartered in Munich, silicon.de offers a broad range of online marketing, research and event services that provide technology and business executives with access to vital information, news and analysis, and integrated marketing programmes.

Google is making its word processing and spreadsheet programs available for free to all comers on its Web site, marking the Internet search leader’s latest effort to provide an alternative to Microsoft’s dominant software applications. The software package, expected to be available Wednesday, combines a spreadsheet application that Google introduced in June with a word processing program called Writely that the Mountain View-based company bought for an undisclosed amount in March. As part of the expansion, the Writely name will disappear. The new package will be called Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

It isn’t over yet, but 2006 is already a record year when it comes to security vulnerabilities. There is, however, a silver lining: A smaller chunk of the flaws are high risk. Last year, researchers at Internet Security Systems identified 5,195 vulnerabilities in software. On Monday, the count for this year stood at 5,450, according to the company’s survey, and the projected total for the whole of the year is almost 7,500 bugs.