Ray Everett-Church

As we approach the end of 2007, I have been thinking back on the year’s events in the worlds of privacy and anti-spam, and the industry that is emerging around one of the many interesting intersections of the two: the budding field of reputation management. For years I have written about the running battles between […]

Earlier this month in Dallas, Texas, nearly two dozen Internet service providers, messaging product vendors, and email industry associations gathered for two days to take the future of email authentication out for a test drive. This quiet event, hosted by Alt-N Technologies, brought together technical representatives from many of the biggest names in email from […]

At almost every turn these days, we are faced with situations that inspire memories of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.” It’s the all-knowing and all-seeing government watcher whose merciless oversight is rivaled only by the fervor with which the government assures us that everything is done – purely – in our best interests. Luckily for those […]

News broke last week that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, home of the dingbats who routinely issue patents on water, fire, and ham sandwiches, has issued a new patent to Microsoft. What could this insanely cool patentable idea of the 21st century be? The latest and greatest from Redmond, Washington, is patent 7,269,853, on […]

Last week in Las Vegas, a husband and wife team were indicted for putting $60,000 in counterfeit $100 bills into slot machines at Caesar’s Palace. Apparently the fake bills were of such high quality that the bill scanners on the slot machines accepted about 600 of the bogus Benjamins over the course of four days […]

According to the majority of the testimony at this month’s “Spam Summit,” held by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the state of the fight against spam is pretty much the same as it has been for the last several years. The two days of presentations can largely be boiled down to the following bullets: […]

With the recent release of the innovative “Street View” feature to its mapping service, Google has one-upped the competition with a clever gimmick that lets you view an image of your destination just as if you were driving past it at street level. To achieve this effect, Google hired a van full of cameras to […]

For those who haven’t had the joy of installing the new Windows Vista operating system, the humor of the latest installment in Apple Computer’s “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” series of television ads may be lost on you. But if you’ve ever been asked by a piece of software, your operating system, or a […]

With last week’s sobering news that medical identity theft is on the rise, we now face the prospect of privacy and security problems turning from annoyances into life-or-death issues. Medical identity theft is one of those “perfect storm” scenarios, the confluence of security problems with medical records and time-tested insurance reimbursement scams. Modern fraud techniques […]

As we approach the end of another year, the pessimist in me always enjoys looking back at the year to wallow in all the missed opportunities. High on my disappointment list for 2005 is the fact that, after yet another year of fighting spam, the world seems no closer to solving the problem of unwanted, […]

As this month’s controversy over Sony’s distribution of music CDs with flawed digital rights management (DRM) software continues to play itself out, the whole mess is already primed to become a classic case study in why corporations need competent Privacy Officers to keep them out of trouble. According to news reports, about 20 different CD […]

With losses from identity-related fraud topping $52 billion, the need to rein in identity thieves has been a pressing problem for financial services firms. But with banks and merchants still lost in the sea of costly new technologies for authenticating legitimate financial transactions, banking regulators last week fired yet another warning shot across the industry’s […]