Brian Livingston

SAN JOSE — The signs are unmistakable. That feeling is in the air again. The Internet boom is back. Let’s party! The Metrics of Money Mania Tech stocks may still be in the doldrums. But other indicators show that your company may have opportunities now that you haven’t had since the Internet bubble burst in […]

I’ve seen the future, and I want it installed on my network today. This is the only problem: I’ll have to find someone to mass-produce tomorrow’s new, new thing first. What I’ve seen is an internationally patented design for an innovative ”secure application proxy”. It’s something that promises to immunize PCs against any threat that […]

I wrote in this space last week that your company needs to stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser immediately. Due to unsolvable security holes that have recently been demonstrated in IE, it looks like the free and soon-to-be-released Firefox browser, a project of the Mozilla Foundation, is becoming the new hot Web-surfing application of […]

I’m afraid it’s time this week for me to speak the unspeakable — you have to stop using Internet Explorer. You have to stop using it now. Usually in this space, I write about some secret or little-known technology that I can reveal to my readers. This time, I’m forced to cover a topic that […]

When is a Microsoft Windows patch not a patch at all? When you can’t even find out that it exists. We all know that Microsoft releases Windows patches practically every week. What you probably don’t know is the inside story of a patch Microsoft completed months ago but hadn’t released any information about until recently. […]

A little-known organization of 55 of the world’s largest banks has finally become fed up enough with the online thieves known as “phishers” that the banks are doing something about it. The group is called Identrus LLC, and it proposes that online banks use so-called digital certificates to identify themselves and their customers on the […]

If your company sends out an e-mail newsletter to customers, you may find yourself suffering from a new problem I call “spam trap poisoning.” Spam traps are e-mail addresses that antispam groups post on the Web but don’t use for sending e-mail. Instead, these addresses lie in wait until they’re found by “harvester” programs. These […]

One of the most famous, or infamous, groups that try to “block” spam-sending servers is SpamCop.net, directed by Julian Haight. Because SpamCop was purchased last year by IronPort Systems, a maker of e-mail server appliances and antispam solutions, I thought it would be interesting to see whether any of the controversies that swirled around Haight […]

A security company is shipping today a new software release that it claims will better protect your servers against hacker attacks — whether or not you’ve installed the latest patches from Microsoft. Primary Response 2.2 is software you install on Windows NT, 2000, 2003, or Solaris servers. It “immunizes” your servers against undefined intrusions, the […]

It’s not enough that you have to install firewalls, antivirus programs, spam filters, and adware cleaners on all your PCs — now you have to guard against something called “cache bashing,” too. If it’s important that your company be findable when potential customers look for your topic in search engines — and what company doesn’t […]