Larry Seltzer

Recently I got an ad for a 2GB USB flash key for $29.99 (after rebate) and saw an announcement of a 16GB key in the works. 16GB! Its not too long ago that such capacities were stunning even for hard disks. Pretty soon youll get a key like that in your box of Rice Krispies. […]

There was a time, not quite ten years ago, when many serious people expected Java to be the dominant computing platform of the future. The technology business is overflowing with similar stories of products that received inordinate attention for a time, only to fade when real decision making came along. One of my favorites is […]

The anti-spyware business has a chip on its shoulder and its hard to blame them, especially with people like me arguing that their whole category of product is, or should be, superfluous. Lately there has been some controversy over testing practices for spyware. Shortly after the controversy over Consumer Reports anti-virus tests peaked, Alex Eckelberry […]

Jose Nazario, blogmaster of the Worm Blog, noticed something interesting about the recent MS06-040 vulnerability. This was one of those very worst kinds of vulnerabilities: accessible through a network interface and capable of executing attack code on the remote system. Many of the most severe examples of worms, and the most famous examples of malware, […]

Early in August someone on Circle ID noted that a wildcard entry had been added to the .cm country domain, which is the TLD (top-level domain) for the West African nation of Cameroon. Cameroon? Who cares, you may be thinking. But a wildcard entry in the DNS (Domain Name System) for a TLD lets the […]

The anti-virus community is abuzz in controversy over the tests performed recently by Consumer Reports on anti-virus products. CR went out and did what many of us have considered in the past, but not actually done: With the help of consultants at ISE (Independent Security Evaluators), they created a test bed of 5,500 new viruses […]

Other than me, it seems like you cant trust anything anymore. The latest item on the official “Untrustworthy List” is Caller ID. Ive had a low opinion of it for a long time anyway. A high percentage of calls come from “Private Caller” or “Out of Area” or some such unhelpful designation, and many of […]

For many businesses, especially smaller ones, the whole idea of UTM is an unambiguously great one: one box that can protect the network against just about all manner of threats. Its relatively cheap, its relatively easy to set up and administer, it protects the entire network, theres tons of competition, and there are plenty of […]

After recognizing that I had a computer gaming problem in college (this is where I spent my time in the early 80s), I basically swore the things off. Back then, decent gaming hardware could only be found in arcade games; graphics hardware for general-purpose microcomputers was a joke. But when the hardware got more sophisticated […]

Here at Larry Seltzers House, Inc., the computing infrastructure has always been more sophisticated than the neighbors and more complex than it really has to be. But I have capabilities from which all home networks would benefit, and toward which the industry must move. After hardware failures in some 6-year-old computers that finally had to […]