Brian McWilliams

The computer whiz kid accused of hacking eBay and five other Internet firms said Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has the wrong man. “I’m pretty confident they don’t have much of a case. They just want to look good and find someone who’s the perfect scapegoat,” Jerome Heckenkamp said in an interview with […]

America Online is quietly displaying third-party ad banners for some large clients on its popular AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ messaging clients. Together, the two platforms boast a user base of 140 million registered users worldwide. That’s potentially a very attractive market for advertisers, and a lucrative new source of revenue for the big online […]

In an attempt to show that personal firewalls may afford their users little protection against serious threats, a respected PC security expert has released a new software tool that pokes holes in many of the leading desktop security packages. Security-conscious Internet users, especially those on broadband connections, have made desktop firewall software into a booming […]

Responding to complaints that the Microsoft Network is allowing spammers to relay junk e-mail through MSN servers, the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) has added several MSN systems to its notorious anti-spam blacklist. The action could potentially disrupt emails from thousands of legitimate MSN subscribers. MAPS is the controversial California non-profit that maintains databases of […]

America Online may be late to the party, but its new, HTML-enabled e-mail client offers unique security and privacy features that could put AOL’s program on top. Too bad AOL had to spoil the effort by forcing HTML down everyone’s throats. While popular, standalone mail packages such as Qualcomm’s Eudora, Microsoft’s Outlook and Outlook Express, […]

Enticed by the allure of new bells and whistles, Jane Donofrio was among the first to download and install AOL version 6 when it was released to the public October 25. But the Atlanta-based child therapist and longtime AOL subscriber never got to try out those new features. “It never connected. I would hear the […]

A team led by Princeton University’s Secure Internet Programming group says it has defeated the copyright protection scheme developed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative. SDMI is the music industry forum trying to build a system for protecting digital music against being illegal copying. The outfit launched the Hack SDMI challenge last month to invite […]

An attacker hijacked Adobe.com from its owner, Adobe Systems Inc. Tuesday, disrupting the big software firm’s Web server and e-mail service for most of Wednesday. Adobe Systems Vice President of Information Systems Gerrard Rutter confirmed Thursday that an as-yet unidentified attacker was able to perform an unauthorized modification of the domain record for adobe.com. The […]

An arbitration panel has awarded pop singer Madonna the rights to the Web address madonna.com. But the site’s current owner Tuesday accused the WIPO panel of impropriety. Dan Parisi, owner of madonna.com since 1998, said in a note at the site that the three-member panel assigned to handle the high-profile case was stacked against him. […]

Internet “superstore” buy.com was at the hub of a security flaw this week as a hole was discovered at its site that lets a user see customers’ vital information — names, addresses and phone numbers. Buy.com confirmed that for several hours on Thursday, as many as thousands of people who returned products to the company […]

Time Warner, Inc., is finding out that in order to talk the talk, it has to walk the walk. Despite the company’s repeated and insistent assurances it wants to and will provide open cable Internet access to competing Internet service providers, its three-year contract agreement is saying another thing entirely. The open access debate for […]

Two days after E*TRADE claimed it had sealed a security hole that had pointed out to them a month previously, a watch dog said users’ safety is still compromised. It was made known to the public last Friday that one Jeffrey Baker, a software developer who has discovered several JavaScript-related security holes on the Net, […]