Larry Seltzer

When Windows Product Activation was announced for Windows XP, the predictions from some were dire. Surely, it was argued, this onerous burden and the certain failures of it to operate properly would finally inspire people to move from Windows. Of course it didnt turn out that way. Activation has been, at worst, a minor nuisance. […]

A whole new class of attacks is emerging to threaten Wi-Fi users. “Evil Twin” and other Wi-Fi-oriented attacks can fool users into providing confidential information or compromise their computers. Heres the basic evil twin scenario: The attacker sits in the parking lot of a coffee house&#8212or maybe even in the coffee house itself&#8212with a Wi-Fi […]

I didnt need to learn about comment spam by reading eWEEK.com. Ive gotten waves of it in my own blogs comments. You may have noticed that you now have to fill in one of those challenge entries asking you to type in the text portrayed in a nearby graphic (a “captcha”), and this has largely […]

A lot of people lost e-mail, access to Web administration and even their porno accounts over the weekend. Yes, it was a momentous and stressful couple of days. Several domains were stolen, including panix.com, the home domain of Internet service provider Panix, the oldest ISP in the New York area (or so they say about […]

In my 2005 predictions column not too long ago I noted that researchers told me that the prospects for new vulnerabilities and attacks in 2005 were rich, in spite of a bumper crop of them in December. Sad to say, it looks like they were right. The first two weeks of 2005 have been insecure […]

Just a few months ago Bill Gates declared that Microsoft would do something about the spyware/adware problem. And the company wasted no time. In December it bought Giant Company Software. Giant wasnt an especially well-known company, but its product was well-regarded. Now, just one month later we have a free initial beta version of a […]

Back in DOS 5.0, Microsoft included an anti-virus scanner (a licensed version of Central Points PC Tools scanner). That was Microsofts last entry into the anti-malware market with a real product, back in an era when viruses generally needed floppy disks to spread. That scanner didnt even make it to DOS 6.0, and here we […]

Ive been a confirmed pessimist on the future of spam for some time now, so it was with a Spocklike upturned eyebrow that I read AOLs announcement last week that it has turned the corner against spam delivered to its users. Its quite a bold announcement. They claim that the amount of spam complaints from […]

Jan. 1 was the five-year anniversary of the Y2K “event.” It seems so long ago and so supplanted by more recent events as to be irrelevant. But its not. Y2K taught us lessons that will always be applicable: Dont believe everything the experts tell you, and be especially skeptical of worst-case predictions for technology. This […]

A new, free browser add-in from English Internet services firm Netcraft Ltd. fights phishing attacks and helps users investigate sites they visit. eWEEK.com tested the new tool bar, available initially only for Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and liked what we saw. All but one phishing link we visited was interrupted by […]