Larry Seltzer

The latest in security compliance regulation is the FDCC, or Federal Desktop Core Configuration. As of Feb. 1, all federal agencies were required to provide to the Office of Management and Budget a list of assets running Windows XP and Windows Vista, and which are compliant with FDCC requirements. By March 31, they will have […]

I take it all back, sort of. ICANN has a way of studying matters, and then studying them some more, and then assigning them to a committee and then putting a preliminary report out for comment – you get the idea. Only after years does the group take action. It seems members have taken action […]

The story of the dismissal of 9 District of Columbia workers for surfing pornography on the Web from their work computers is both a social story and a technical one. My first thought, when I see a story like this, is how stupid some people can be. But it’s even worse than it looks. “Each […]

Everyone believes in privacy (except Scott McNealy); we just differ on how much is the right amount. It is possible to go too far in advocating for privacy. That way lies uncertainty. This seems to be the fate of the European Union, whose Data Privacy Commission leader recently said that IP addresses are personal data […]

I had a moment of clarity today (believe me, I need them). In the wake of the Network Solutions scandal over the company’s employment of front-running and domain tasting, I’ve been talking to a lot of vendors and other interested parties. Front-running is a tricky problem that defies resolution. I’ve been inclined to blame ICANN, […]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The security market is always looking for new ways to sell you the same thing they already sold you. The new phony category is anti-bot tools. When this happened with spyware it somehow happened backwards. In the face of an established market for anti-malware products, known […]

ICANN GNSO has been studying the problem of Domain Tasting for months now in their usual thorough manner. I wrote about the study several months ago and said I expected no prompt action. They have gotten to the point of issuing an initial report. This report discusses the input received by the GNSO during the […]

As we reported earlier, Network Solutions has taken the extraordinary step of registering domains as you search for them. The company acknowledged what is obvious to anyone testing the process and states that it is doing it in order to protect users from abuse by third parties. Network Solutions has responded to criticism with some […]

The use of domain names in most phishing is relatively crude, You see a lot of names like www.somefreewebsite.com/~ingrid/www.bankofamerica.com/…. There’s no SSL, and the tricky part of the domain name is off to the right. A user would really have to ignore the domain name and focus on the body of the page, which is […]

Its as true of any operating system as it is of Windows, but Windows gets a harder time for it: Bad device drivers make for a bad computing experience. Device drivers are effectively system software. Very often its hard to tell the difference between a device driver problem and a Windows bug, and this is […]

I can remember back when anti-virus companies used to test their updates before they sent them out to customers. But then again, I can remember the Johnson administration (Lyndon, not Andrew), so I’m relatively (ahem!) experienced. Anyway, times have changed. The anti-virus business has moved to the Netscape business model of shipping products and letting […]

Security vendors like to report spam numbers, including the overall percentage of e-mail that is spam. The consensus on this number is north of 90 percent now. You’ll see some lower numbers, including about 60 percent from Symantec, but that number discounts certain classes of spam. Essentially, the percentage of e-mail that is spam is […]