Brian Livingston

Can you trust a major corporation to keep your e-mail address out of spammers’ hands after you fill out the company’s unsubscribe form? Not always, according to a service that tracks what happens when addresses are submitted to unsubscribe mechanisms on the Web. I wrote column last week that a service called Lashback LLC has […]

Spammers, who are everyone’s least-favorite Internet users, are cranking up their output every day. But anti-spammers are gaining more tools to defeat them. I wrote on Jan. 3 that you can close off a “back door” that many companies leave wide open on their mail servers. There are some other tricks that anti-spammers would like […]

Many companies are locked in a death struggle with spam. Unfortunately, a simple error in your e-mail setup can allow spam to flood your inbox almost unchallenged. I found this out the hard way, although the solution quickly became obvious. Fortunately, it’s something that almost every company can easily fix, in case the problem is […]

An unusual metasearch service named Gada.be launched its public beta on the Web in October. By November, its novel approach to search got it banned from Google’s listings. The ban has been lifted now, and Gada.be once again appears in Google’s index. But the whole experience — and the goals Gada.be is trying to achieve […]

It’s always exciting to see a new technology that will forever change the way we work. AJAX is the new, new thing that’s doing just that — and word processing is the place where you may feel the impact the most. I wrote last week about InetWord, an online word processor that strives to make […]

You might be pretty mad if you found out that your articles on the Web were being copied and inserted into someone else’s site without permission or credit. To add injury to insult, the “duplicate” site can show up in search-engine listings and make your own site’s listings disappear. This is an example of “Googlewashing” […]

The large e-commerce affiliate network known as Commission Junction (CJ) is gearing up a campaign that uses automated searches of the Web to catch dishonest participants. The network has contracted with Cyveillance, a firm that monitors the online use of trademarked terms, to “spider” the Internet seeking affiliates that generate commissions without legitimately earning them. […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation — a nonprofit organization that works to preserve freedom and privacy on the Internet — has decided to challenge new laws in Michigan and Utah that would tax senders of ordinary e-mail while leaving spammers untouched. "We’re definitely taking a position, which is ‘Opposed,’ " says Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney […]

The two states that have imposed an “e-mail tax” on legitimate senders of requested e-mail communications, as I described in this space last week, start to collect the tax this month. Michigan’s law went into effect on Aug. 1, while Utah’s law takes effect on Aug. 15. In both cases, these dates are just 30 […]

Various “chain letters” have zoomed around the Internet for years, claiming the U.S. Postal Service was going to charge an “e-mail tax.” Those messages were hoaxes. But two states have imposed an e-mail tax for real — and more states may pass such laws soon. The two states that have enacted these e-mail laws, Michigan […]

The idea of providing health information on the Internet never really went away, it just had a little relapse. One of the Web’s most well-known health sites — DrKoop.com, founded in 1997 by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — set a bad example when it had a much-publicized heart attack. The site went […]

You may think visitors to your company’s Web site are carefully reading every word on your home page. But they’re not. People glance at a fragment here, a fragment there, and decide within a matter of seconds whether to stay or leave. Now a remarkable study has measured this hummingbird-like effect that your site’s visitors […]