Larry Loeb

While I have had my fill of Sony DRM and all the screaming that has gone on around it (though it still gives me a chuckle when I see a breathless story in some second-tier MSM newspaper about “Copy Protection on Sony CDs” that is both outdated and inaccurate) there was actually a new wrinkle […]

Last week was shortened by the Thanksgiving holiday, and it seemed the malware guys took it off as well. There was not much going on of recent origin, and the biggest blip on the security radar was the realization by the security community that an Internet Explorer problem first identified six months ago was a […]

Its that time of year when the smell of cooking turkey and mince pie is once again wafting through the house as the family gathers round the hearth. This can only mean one thing to a Machead: its time to start speculating about Macworld SF in January. This is not just speculation for speculations sake; […]

In response to the firestorm over its DRM on CDs, Sony made available last week a Web-based “uninstaller” to remove it. It appears this cure is worse than the disease. /zimages/2/28571.gifClick here to read about how Microsoft plans to handle Sonys DRM software. Matti Nikki of Finland was the first to figure out just what […]

When I wrote last week about Sony DRM mess, I opined that it would serve MBAs of the future as a textbook example of how not to do things. It turns out that theres even more things that Sony is doing, without permission, to their customers computers with another DRM system. People more savvy than […]

Clues in a patent filed by Apple in 2004 but just made public Nov. 3 by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office point to what Apple may be doing on the new Apple-Intel machines due out in 2006. Patent application 20050246554 by James D. Batson (and assigned to Apple) was first filed on April 30, […]

Sony is reportedly pulling its digital rights management “rootkit” from the market. But it isnt reporting everything. “The Sony copy-protection software does not install itself on Macintosh computers or ordinary CD and DVD players,” Reuters reported today. Theres just one problem with that statement: it happens to be flat-out wrong. While the XCP version of […]

I read the news today, oh boy. I usually read the New York Times daily. On paper, which may surprise those of you who think news only comes electronically. Reading on paper helps one to see how each of the individual articles fit with each other, to discover trends from a context that is not […]

Anti-virus software has always lived with the tradeoff of performance versus thoroughness. Its led to some software design decisions on the methods of how files are actually scanned that are now coming home to roost. Recently, researcher Andrey Bayora revealed that it is possible to fool the scanners into thinking that a file under scan […]

Poor Skype. They started out last week with the best of intentions, releasing what they called an independent security evaluation of their VOIP product, and ended up with egg on their virtual faces as high risk security vulnerabilities came to light. Skype, based in Luxembourg, has positioned its VOIP product as superior to any one […]