Brian Livingston

With all the brainpower in the computer industry, don’t you think our supposed experts would have invented by now a standard way to get off an e-mail list without you having to hunt and peck through a different procedure every time? One of the few things that the “YOU-CAN-SPAM Act” did when it went into […]

Is it safe to use an “unsubscribe” link to stop getting e-mail from a particular sender? Or will clicking the link just get you more spam? One firm’s executives have studied this question extensively — and the answer they found is very likely to surprise you. To Unsubscribe Or Not To Unsubscribe I’ve often decried […]

Microsoft isn’t getting everything it wants these days, and this month provides yet another example. In the space of a few days, its “Sender ID” proposal to identify legitimate e-mail was voted down by an Internet standards body and rejected by the world’s largest Internet service provider (ISP), America Online (AOL). That reversal of fortune […]

Just as antivirus and antispam vendors must constantly upgrade their products to detect new kinds of attacks, an escalating battle of software is raging against the scourge of online advertising — click fraud. I reported in this space on Aug. 17 that some experts believe fraudulent pay-per-click schemes represent about 10% of billings in the […]

Imagine that every time you made a deposit of $100 to your bank account, you found out later that the bank had credited you for only $98.50. That’s similar to what a recent study on the reliability of e-mail found. As I reported in this space last week, more than 1.5% of e-mails never arrived […]

You’ve probably written one of those no-holds-barred e-mails to your boss or some other company mucky-muck. As soon as you clicked Send, you panicked when you realized that the recipient was actually going to read your electronic rant. Well, a new study has good news: there’s a 1.5% chance that the V.I.P. you directed your […]

What happens when a major computer security firm issues a report showing that its latest software is vastly superior to other, competing products? The subjects of that attack rise to their own defense, as though fighting off a new Internet virus. That’s the situation in a nutshell after eEye Digital Security recently released a controversial […]

The market for software that prevents attackers from gaining access to corporate networks has just become a lot more interesting with the introduction of Blink, a new defensive suite from eEye Digital Security. The makers of Blink say it takes a new approach to intrusion prevention, but competitors disagree. Who can you believe? A Choice […]

Somewhere around 10 percent of the billings charged to pay-per-click advertisers by Google.com and Overture (a subsidiary of Yahoo.com) are based on fraudulent activity, according to some advertising experts — and the cost to many advertisers may be much higher. “Click fraud” is a dirty little secret that threatens to undermine the financial success of […]

SAN JOSE — The Web e-conomy is heating up. There now are plenty of people, just as there were during the Internet bubble of the ’90s, who’d like to help you spend your company’s money buying online advertising to make your business grow, Grow, GROW! But do you need them more than they need you? […]