Brian Prince

July 4 weekend is usually a time for barbecues, beach parties and Independence Day spam. But the death of pop superstar Michael Jackson may have changed the face of the annual spam barrage. Instead of just the typical deluge of e-mails luring users with tales of fireworks displays, spammers and malware authors are still riding […]

It’s heeeeeerrrrre. The Month of Twitter Bugs kicked off July 1 with news of four cross-site scripting bugs affecting bit.ly, a popular URL shortening service used by Twitter users. The bugs are the first entry in a monthlong effort to expose third-party vulnerabilities that impact Twitter. The brainchild of security researcher Aviv Raff, Month of […]

For anyone who thought the spam slowdown that followed the shutdown of rogue ISP 3FN was still going on, Google has some bad news for you. In its report on spam during the second quarter of 2009, Google found that spam continued to tick upward, experiencing a short-lived but significant drop when 3FN was dismantled. […]

Facebook is simplifying its privacy options as it simultaneously looks to make it easier for members of the social networking site to share content with anyone on the Internet. For starters, the company is consolidating about six privacy pages and roughly 40 settings onto one page. The site will also standardize the options for each […]

The PostgreSQL 8.4 database has hit the streets, bringing with it a host of new features. But perhaps just as important is what is going on behind the scenes. As the open-source database has trucked along, the amount of work required to get the database production-ready has grown. To make sure everything gets done, contributors […]

Oracle has released a new tool designed to help developers more easily design data models for the Oracle database. Dubbed the Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, the standalone tool supports logical, relational, multidimensional and data type modeling, and with it, users can build and modify data models. “Every successful application starts with a strong data […]

Last year, three MIT students got banned from presenting their research on hacking the Boston subway system at DefCon. This year, it is Juniper Networks’ turn to get the boot. Responding to pressure from an ATM vendor, Juniper has agreed to pull a talk originally scheduled for both the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences […]

A blind Boston-area hacker was hit with more than 11 years in prison June 26 for his role in hacking into a telephone network and threatening the Verizon investigator building a case against him. Matthew Weigman, 19, also known as “Little Hacker,” was accused of being part of a gang of telephone hackers that made […]

Notorious hacker Max Ray Butler, also known as Max Ray Vision, pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges June 29, acknowledging his involvement in the theft of credit card and identity data. Butler, 36, of San Francisco, was a former security consultant turned hacker who had been on the radar of law enforcement under his various […]

Mozilla has responded to enhanced privacy settings in rival browsers from Microsoft, Apple and Google with new privacy features of its own. In Firefox 3.5, released June 30, Mozilla has added its own version of private browsing to match a feature offered by Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and Safari. But Mozilla took the additional […]