Brian Livingston

Most of the time, I urge my readers to be cautious and frugal. But now it’s the Christmas shopping season, so that advice has to go right out the window. This is the time of year that you’re expected to buy something for everyone in your immediate family as well as your extended circle of […]

A major U.S. Internet service provider (ISP) plans to offer a novel security technology to its millions of customers within the next month. EarthLink, based in Atlanta, will add “behavior blocking” software provided by Sana Security of San Mateo, Calif., to the ISP’s Protection Control Center, a security suite that’s currently in use by 1.2 […]

Internet Explorer 7.0, which Microsoft released to the public last month, has numerous advantages over the Redmond company’s five-year-old Web browser, IE version 6.0. But not if you’re a user of Intuit’s QuickBooks 2004, 2005, or the original build of 2006. If you install IE 7, according to Intuit executives, it can cause the affected […]

There are some simple steps your company can take to demonstrate that the e-mails you’re sending aren’t spam. If you’re not taking them, many recipients are now ready and willing to filter your messages into the trash. Large corporations have adopted new forms of “authenticated e-mail” at an astonishing rate. About 75 percent of Fortune […]

Microsoft released its long-awaited Internet Explorer 7.0 browser on Oct. 19. The free download allows Windows users to replace IE 6.0, which hasn’t had a serious feature update since it first came out in 2002. IE 6 has been a serious p.r. problem for the Redmond software company, producing a string of warnings — seemingly […]

If a publication runs advertisements for various companies, you pretty much expect that those ads are from legitimate businesses, right? How about if you found out that one very large source of ads was running come-ons for companies that charge consumers money for other people’s software that’s usually given away for free? An antispyware researcher […]

TRUSTe.org, a nonprofit organization that sells “privacy seals” to Web sites that prominently post their data-acquisition policies, says its seals mark “companies that adhere to TRUSTe’s strict privacy principles.” But a respected antispyware researcher has published an analysis that disputes the trustworthiness of sites that bear the TRUSTe seal. “TRUSTe-certified sites are more than twice […]

As I wrote in this space last week, ETFs are the fastest-growing investment vehicles in global markets today. A little more than 250 exist today, but within a couple of years there’ll be thousands. What are ETFs, you say? Exchange-traded funds. They have some of the characteristics of mutual funds, representing the combined value of […]

Whoever said, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” obviously never worked on Wall Street. High-powered trading institutions spend a great deal of their time dreaming up ever-stranger ways for people to bet on the direction of anything that moves. Options, futures, financial derivatives — depending on whom you speak with, all of these add liquidity […]

Can social-networking sites motivate volunteers to raise money and recruit activists for major U.S. political parties? That’s what the Republican National Committee had in mind earlier this year when it launched MyGOP, a Web 2.0-style service seeking strong personal involvement by its visitors. I wrote last week about a similar experiment, PartyBuilder, that recently went […]