Security

As an enthusiastic Google user, I was immediately interested when I saw the headlines that proclaimed that Google was boosting its users' privacy with its new Dashboard. Well, as often happens, the reality wasn't quite up to the hype.

This week on Security Levity... how China views Web filtering. It should be no surprise that the Chinese government is sensitive about certain forms of speech. We in the West may not like it, but...

Lone on-site IT engineer at a small military base in the desert in Iraq is very gung-ho about doing his part, and he wants to be able to brag about his time ‘outside the wire' -- so he comes up with a novel excuse.

Now you can jailbreak and unlock your iPhone -- even a 3G or 3GS with OS 3.1.2 or baseband 05.11.07. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers bow down and worship George "Geohot" Hotz. Not to mention really strange black & white photos...
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Think Windows PC security is a hassle? It's really not much better than that in enterprise data centers, says Scottrade CIO Ian Patterson. Security vendors, he says, need to step up their game.

Software company Malwarebytes has accused IObit of stealing their intellectual property, in the form of the Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware database. And, they offer proof.

The surge of Windows 7 market share in October certainly sounds like good news for Microsoft. But Microsoft shouldn't celebrate so quickly, because there's evidence much of that gain has been driven by widespread piracy in Eastern Europe.

This week on Security Levity... the second in a series of posts about spam in different cultures. This time: Nigeria, home of the 419 scam. We've all received advance-fee fraud come-ons: typically, badly-worded invitations to help a bank teller "liberate" money from a forgotten bank account. The basic idea is to gradually draw you into a web of lies, play on your greedy appetite for easy money, and then hit you for some "expenses"... or worse.

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The City of Los Angeles has had it with GroupWise, and will replace it with Google Apps. It's a big win for la GOOG, especially as it beat Microsoft to the deal. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers count how many angels can dance on a cloud.
(GOOG) (MSFT) Not to mention iPhone costumes...

This nationwide retailer's help desk staff spend a lot of their time resetting users' passwords. And they try to be nice about it -- but sometimes it just doesn't help.

Smart phone betrayal -- how they are being used to spy on their owners and reveal our most intimate of secrets. See what's being done, how it's being accomplished, and what you can do about it.

President Barack Obama's White House has chosen Drupal to run the whitehouse.gov Web site. They say George W. Bush's old CMS wasn't cutting it any longer. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers resist equating open source with socialism. Not to mention mugshot shirts...

The new Security Essentials antivirus product from Microsoft has gotten a lot of first looks. Here I take a more detailed look at one aspect of it, defending the hosts file.

This week on Security Levity... the delayed DNS hack. Spammers and botnet developers are an ingenious bunch. If spam wasn't so obnoxious and criminal, it would be easy to be impressed by some of their imaginative technical solutions.

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Newly hired pilot fish is issued a computer by a member of the IT staff. Great, says fish, now I can load the programs to interface with our test equipment. IT guy's reply: No, you can't.