Larry Seltzer

Its amazing how slow some things can be in the fast-moving Internet age, and how conservative some companies can be in it. But in order to make the Internet more secure, were going to have to force some changes in place, because they arent happening fast enough. Regular readers might have guessed Im talking about […]

Theres no lower form of life than the mass spammer. Theyve tried every abuse and malformation of e-mail standards to get their vile product through to us, and now theyve sunk to the level of adhering to standards. At least a little. It wont help them much. A couple weeks ago I read an analysis […]

Im incredulous at some of the criticism Im hearing of AOL and Yahoos decision to replace some of their whitelist with Goodmails service. Most of it reflects simple misunderstanding and a naive desire to believe the worst of big companies. Goodmail is an accreditation service, in other words a service that vouches for the sender […]

Testing is a consistently underappreciated part of software development. Comprehensive testing takes time away from development and delays product releases, both anathemas to developers. And yet when a program turns out to be low-quality, you have to know that on the inside many people are whispering that the testing guys didnt do their job. Ive […]

The Microsoft of recent decades has been much more willing than in the past to cast its own bright ideas aside and do what its customers want instead. Every few weeks we see another example of this in Internet Explorer 7. The more I see of IE 7 the more I think its going to […]

I guess Black Hat just gets hackers excited and optimistic for more bad news. This leads them to believe, for example, that Apples move to x86 for the Mac will make the platform less secure. Claims like these raise basic questions about what creates a vulnerability in an operating system and how attackers exploit them. […]

Microsoft has, for many years, licensed the source code for Windows to a variety of partners, large customers, educational institutions and others. But until now, the company would rather have incurred large fines, legal bills and distractions than make the code available to competitors. Microsoft execs must have thought that making the code available would […]

I remember sometime around 1996 or 1997 I was in a meeting with Bill Gates talking about the future of Windows. I dont recall the exact context, but he said that he thought eventually they would have to require device drivers to be digitally signed. They must take “eventually” seriously at Microsoft, even when the […]

I have a degree in public policy. After I graduated, I preferred a programming job to grad school in my field, but I did take some political science lessons with me into my actual career. One of my favorite books from public policy was “The Moon and the Ghetto” by Richard R. Nelson. Basically, it […]

When you first learn about rootkits its easy to see the sinister applications of them, and theyre pretty scary. A really well-written rootkit, if you can deliver it to the system, can be very difficult to detect while the software is running. Fortunately, the very best rootkits exist only in theory (Or do they? How […]

This time two weeks ago, the security community was panicking over the potential damage caused by the WMF vulnerability. You can argue, as I did, that the mitigating factors were strong and it wasnt as serious an issue as some argued, but clearly the watershed event in getting past it was Microsofts prompt release of […]

Inspired somewhat by the Department of Homeland Security Threat Advisory Level (or was it the other way around?), Symantec maintains a global threat level called ThreatCon, defined as “a measurement of the global threat exposure, delivered as part of Symantec DeepSight Threat Management System.” On Tuesday, Symantec elevated ThreatCon to a level 3 (out of […]