Special report: Without entirely changing his mind about the core assessment for his IT Doesn’t Matter article, Nicholas Carr conceded during an interview that information technology might make a difference, after all — but only in certain cases. The discussion with Carr is part of a package, When IT puts business in the lead, that includes case studies of JetBlue, Netflix and BNSF Railways and how each uses IT as a competitive advantage. Security: A new bug in IE enables hackers to scan the hard drives of Google Desktop users to steal private information, such as credit card numbers. Meanwhile, the virus scanning capability that Google added to Gmail is drawing complaints from some users. Columnists’ Corner: The newly-minted Firefox 1.5 “has even got Microsoft running scared,” opines Neil McAllister. Even though its Web standards support is not perfect, the open source browser has spawned what McAllister calls Browser Wars 2.0. This time around, it’s a reversal of roles and Microsoft is the one that needs to catch up. SOA: As a successful SOA user Merrill Lynch metamorphoses into a vendor of sorts and sells a Web services interface it built to SOA Software. AmberPoint upgrades its SOA platform and equips it to manage more complex sets of services. The news beat: JBoss buys transactioning middleware from Hewlett-Packard and Arjuna Technologies to add to its open source roster, IBM says its Workplace will support the Open Document standard, Microsoft plans to tweak ActiveX and IE as a means to skirt patents held by Eolas Technologies, and Arena Solutions refreshes its product lifecycle management software-as-a-service offering. Software Development