Brian Livingston

The two states that have imposed an “e-mail tax” on legitimate senders of requested e-mail communications, as I described in this space last week, start to collect the tax this month. Michigan’s law went into effect on Aug. 1, while Utah’s law takes effect on Aug. 15. In both cases, these dates are just 30 […]

Various “chain letters” have zoomed around the Internet for years, claiming the U.S. Postal Service was going to charge an “e-mail tax.” Those messages were hoaxes. But two states have imposed an e-mail tax for real — and more states may pass such laws soon. The two states that have enacted these e-mail laws, Michigan […]

It’s not too hard to choose a good Web-based reader for RSS (Really Simple Syndication), because there are only three major online players. But if you want a reader that runs as an application on your PC, there are dozens to choose from. Early this year, the blog for FeedBurner, a free service that manages […]

Getting good numbers on the most popular online readers of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) isn’t easy, as I said in my column last week. I published figures in that column on the top 20 RSS readers, both online and client-based. The figures were provided by FeedBurner, a free service that handles more than 70,000 RSS […]

If Microsoft starts supporting RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a native feature of the new Internet Explorer 7.0 this year, RSS feeds will become even more popular than they already are. Which RSS readers will people use to read all of the constantly updated bulletins? And, more importantly, which one should your company pick? I […]

Love is a beautiful thing. And it’ll be really beautiful for a lot of Web users if it turns out to be true, as was announced last week, that Microsoft loves RSS. RSS stands for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. It allows your computer to check “feeds” from your favorite Web sites throughout the […]

The idea of providing health information on the Internet never really went away, it just had a little relapse. One of the Web’s most well-known health sites — DrKoop.com, founded in 1997 by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — set a bad example when it had a much-publicized heart attack. The site went […]

Computer users in the Western world had better adjust to the fact that excellent software is coming from China and will initially be available only in Chinese. That’s the situation with IceSword, a program I wrote about on May 31 and June 7. IceSword is a remarkably effective tool against “rootkits,” virus-type programs that can […]

I wrote in this space last week that IceSword, a new antivirus tool by a Chinese security research group, had gained the respect of even some hackers. Specifically, I quoted the author of Hacker Defender, a so-called rootkit program, who said on his site, “One of my priorities this summer [will be] to beat IceSword.” […]

The creator of one of the world’s most effective “rootkits” — programs that can successfully hide from antivirus software — has been defeated, at least temporarily, by a Chinese computer security group. Rootkit writers have, for some time, been perfecting techniques to avoid detection by antivirus programs. Such rootkits aren’t yet widespread but have become […]