Larry Seltzer

Id seen it myself recently, but Symantecs Security Response team has officially noticed that attacks on Java are on the rise. We were all probably a little too naive back in the mid-90s when Java came out promising, among other exaggerated claims, immunity from security problems. There were always some Java security issues, but they […]

Thanks to the folks at Domain Name Wire for blogging about a serious scam designed to steal money from domain name owners. You could say its a new sort of phish. Domain renewal scams are not a new thing. Because whois information is public, unscrupulous registrars have, for years, harvested the information in it and […]

When I heard about the Google-Postini deal the first thought I had was about how Google would have a field day mining all the data that Postini filters. The second thought I had was that the first thought was ridiculous. Theyd never do such a thing with Postini data, which belongs to enterprise customers who […]

If youre in IT in a big company and youre concerned about printer security, good for you. I think caring enough to work on it is the biggest part of the solution. After my first story on the subject of printer hacking I got a lot of e-mail with printer security horror stories. I ended […]

In 1995, when the Internet was not yet mainstream, Stephen Michael Cohen stole the sex.com domain from Gary Kremen. Unlike more recent stories of domain theft, the theft of sex.com was not so much about technical matters as interpersonal relations. As a practical matter, the battle over that domain is over, but the fighting goes […]

Its not your average bug report and patch. Its your CPU that has a problem, and people are debating how serious it is. CPU bugs are nothing new. Around 1990 I spent a day with an IBM programmer who worked on the companys DOS versions, and he wouldnt shut up about how buggy some of […]

Youve heard it for years. Its against the rules for them to come in, and its against the rules for them to perform work. But the demand is so high theres just no stopping them. Im writing, obviously, about those newfangled electronics devices that IT wont (officially) allow onto the corporate network. The new poster […]

The biggest spammer in the world is a huge, imposing presence in the Internet, known for mercilessly wiping out opposition. China? Russia? No, you guessed it: Its Verizon. The numbers come from Trend Micro, one of the biggest security companies in the world. Ive known Dave Rand, chief technology officer of Trend Micro Internet Content […]

I have to admit upfront that Ive never been enamored of the One Laptop Per Child project. I think computers are way down the list of assistance needed in the countries targeted by this program. Still, some very smart people have put a lot of sincere, hard work into it, and its always interesting to […]

Why will you love Safari for Windows? One reason, according to the Safari Web site, is that “Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.” I guess were at Day 0 now, because no program in my experience has had a more brutal first few hours on the Internet than Safari for Windows. […]

Its no surprise that people at Dell were bothered by my column two weeks ago about “crapware” on their systems. They responded in e-mail. What the hey, Ill include their entire e-mail from Anne Camden of Dells Corporate Communications: “I guess you havent been to Dell.com in a while to see how customers now have […]

We know from court decisions in the last few years in Virginia and California that its OK for third parties (anywhere in the world) to hack into your computer to hunt for kiddie porn. The police encourage them and the courts look the other way. But what about the police? A recent F-Secure blog by […]