Brian Livingston

We know how to make the Internet secure. Now the question is, “Will we do it?” I wrote in this space last week about “Pass2Go,” a piece of software that resides on a key-sized USB Flash drive. The device stores all of the username/password combinations that log you into the various Web sites and secure […]

Quick! Can you remember all the user names and passwords that you’ve used at every Web site where you’ve ever registered? I’ll bet you can’t. But it’s no shame not to remember all these things off the top of your head. No one can. That’s why people write their passwords on Post-It notes and stick […]

Have you ever experienced a difficult problem that seemed unsolvable — until you realized at the last moment that a simple solution was staring you right in the face? Something like that is happening in the battle to eradicate spam. Two major proposals to identify and screen out the senders of unsolicited bulk e-mail are […]

Ah, it’s harvest time and the crops are in — but we can still hear the buzzing and whirring of the harvester robots that are sucking e-mail addresses off Web sites across the Internet. Most Net users aren’t aware that spammers use software programs called harvesters to gather the hundreds of millions of e-mail addresses […]

After a long period of development and beta testing, the final “gold” version of Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9 — and the computer press has largely hailed this new competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser with praise suitable for the Second Coming of Christ. I hate to interrupt all this lovey-dovey, huggy-wuggy stuff, […]

You’ve probably received from acquaintances dozens of e-mail messages like the following: “Hi, this is Bob. I’ll be out of the office next week and won’t be checking my e-mail. If you need something, try me after that…” and so forth. Now imagine that you’re checking your bank account online a few hours later. Unbeknownst […]

Who would have thought that a day would come when there are far more companies selling ways to patch PC operating systems than there are companies selling PC operating systems? That’s where we find ourselves now. The Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system ships on more than 93 percent of PCs worldwide, according to a report […]

The election for President of the United States is finally upon us — and one software company is encouraging a big voter turnout by giving away copies of its latest product. The company is CoffeeCup Software, and the product is its new CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2005, a Web developer’s tool that aims to knock Microsoft’s […]

They say the cobbler’s children have no shoes. In a similar way, it may be that Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, doesn’t have enough programmers to discover security holes in Windows. The Redmond technology giant released 10 separate security bulletins on Oct. 12, which are said to patch 22 different weaknesses in Windows. When […]

If you’re thinking of buying new personal computers for your employees, what kind would you get them? Desktop computers, handhelds, laptops, laptops that convert into tablets, slates with no keyboard at all? A small company thinks the answer is a tablet-like, slate computer with BlackBerry-like keys on both sides of the screen. This solution is […]