Larry Seltzer

A news fad broke out in February: After the controversy over the sale of U.S. port management rights to a Dubai-owned company, the same agency that had vetted the sale announced an investigation into the sale of SourceFire, a company based in the United States, to Check Point, an Israeli company. Neither sale alarms me […]

Youll find no better example of political demagoguery than the coalition formed to oppose Goodmail and AOLs use of Goodmails services. The Web site announcing their positions is so overflowing with misinformation and presumption that its hard to know where to start in addressing it. The site is filled with cheap, pejorative terms like “email […]

During the announcement of the enterprise Community Technology Preview of Windows Vista Feb. 22, I was struck when the Microsoft rep said that, according to his companys research, 80 percent of enterprise users run as administrator. I just couldnt believe thats true. Wednesday must be Obtuse Day here. I asked around, and I was the […]

The release in the last few days of malware for the Mac and Linux underscore some old issues about how it is possible to have malware on those platforms. I have some new thoughts though. Ive begun to wonder what Apple would do if a real problem developed. To be very clear, a real problem […]

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. […]