Brian Livingston

The fact that Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York State, filed suit last month against an alleged spyware company has been widely reported. But what everyone seems to have missed in these reports is how Spitzer’s case managed to get to court — despite the fact that New York has no actual law […]

Experts in combating “spyware” and “adware” are now warning that the widely publicized security holes that plague Internet Explorer and other Web browsers may not be the most common ways unwanted software gets into computer users’ PCs. Eric Howes, a frequent contributor to SpywareWarrior.com and a consultant to antispyware companies, says the media focus on […]

I wrote in this space last week that Microsoft had announced a new output format that threatens Adobe’s de facto PDF standard. The new format, code-named Metro, was outlined at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). Metro, as described by Microsoft, will be included in the next version of Windows, which is currently known as […]

After months of speculation, Microsoft unveiled on April 25 at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) details on its new document format code-named Metro. This format is considered by many to be aimed at the heart of Adobe Acrobat, the application that produces PDF files, today’s ubiquitous view-and-print standard. Will Metro really change the way […]

I wrote in this space last week that e-mail is continuing to become more and more unreliable as a way for companies to reach consumers who sign up on notification lists. According to a new study I cited by Pivotal Veracity, an e-mail deliverability consulting service, an average of 15% of the permission-based (opt-in) e-mail […]

E-mail is increasingly losing its reliability as a way for businesses to send notifications to interested consumers, according to new figures from a message-monitoring firm. Unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE, also known as spam) has grown so rapidly that it now outnumbers legitimate e-mail 4-to-1. Internet service providers, in an attempt to avoid spam complaints from […]

I wrote in this space last weekthat USCountVotes.org, an election-reform group, had issued a report signed by several Ph.D.s claiming there must have been vote tampering in one or more U.S. states in the 2004 presidential election. The analysts, most of whom are professors of computer science or mathematics at such institutions as the University […]

A group of distinguished computer scientists and mathematicians, including nine Ph.D.s, says it has found statistical evidence that vote counts of the 2004 U.S. presidential election were tampered with in one or more states, affecting the outcome. To support its claims, the group, known as USCountVotes.org, shows that exit polls taken on Nov. 2 cannot […]

I wrote in this space last week that Sana Security, a software firm, had released Primary Response 3.0. This is the first version of the company’s “host-based intrusion prevention system” (HIPS) that installs on desktop PCs as well as corporate servers. Version 3.0 observes the activity taking place on a PC and attempts to shut […]

The new kinds of malware that are zooming around the Internet these days make you long for a simpler time when the only way a PC could catch a computer virus was to insert an infected floppy disk. Now that PCs are connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, your network is constantly threatened […]