David Miller

If FunCade, Jessica Simpson Screensaver, UnSpyPC or Winfixer is installed on your computer, chances are your machine is spying on you. All four applications are the most recent additions to StopBadware.org’s Badware Watch List. StopBadware.org is a nonprofit consumer protection initiative formed by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s […]

Yahoo and eBay’s agreement to share core technologies in a deal unveiled Thursday has delighted analysts and investors, who say the joint venture will bring big benefits to both companies. The Yahoo-eBay partnership is also expected to present an interesting challenge to Google, since the alliance should give a big boost to Yahoo’s search advertising […]

Linux has apparently been very good to Novell. Novell announced on Wednesday that it sold its stake in Celerant Consulting, which had been Novell’s majority-owned management consulting subsidiary, for $77 million to a group composed of Celerant management and Caledonia Investments, a UK-based investment trust. The company now intends to focus all of its attention […]

Just as Apple Computer launched a new ad touting OSX’s resilience against viruses, the Macintosh operating system and applications have come under fire for harboring serious security flaws. Security software vendor McAfee, The SANS Institute and independent researchers have all recently published reports slamming Mac security. It’s a big switch for the computer company that […]

UPDATED: Targeting ads to match users’ needs and wants has long been a benefit of online advertising, but now Microsoft says that it’s taking that concept a step further with its just-out-of-beta adCenter. The effort is seen competing with Yahoo’s Overture and Google’s AdWords services. Microsoft eventually hopes to compete with AdSense, Google’s popular contextual […]

Music piracy, long associated with peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, is a booming business offline. Professional pirates have become more sophisticated and are costing the music industry $300 million a year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. In a report released on Wednesday, the RIAA, […]

Zero-day exploits — the most difficult hack attacks to defend against — are on the rise, according to the SANS Institute, a security research organization. Internet Explorer users continue to be subjected to zero-day attacks when they visit Web sites that are set up to exploit vulnerabilities in IE that Microsoft hasn’t yet patched, SANS […]

A nasty side effect of spam and e-mailed viruses is costing companies an estimated $5 billion per year in IT resources, according to security services company IronPort. The culprit: Bounced e-mail message warnings sent from servers advising an e-mail sender that the e-mail they tried to send was undeliverable. Since virtually all spammers and scammers […]

It’s bloggers versus big business in a California courtroom on Thursday as the Electronic Freedom Foundation faces off against Apple Computer in a case that could impact the rights of online and offline journalists to shield their sources. The EFF is appealing an earlier court ruling stating that journalists/bloggers may not be able to protect […]

With tax day approaching, federal officials are warning taxpayers to steer clear of e-mail scams offering fast access to tax refunds. The IRS and the U.S. Treasury Department say bogus e-mails from the IRS have been increasing in number and sophistication since December 2005. These so-called phishing scams — intended to pry personal information from […]

A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) takes aim at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial law enacted seven years ago to protect intellectual property in the digital age. “Unintended Consequences: Seven Years Under the DMCA” is a collection of well-known and obscure stories about the misuses of the DMCA. Among […]

Windows Live Academic Search, Microsoft’s search service for scientists, scholars and other such studious folks, debuted on Tuesday with the noble aim of providing easy access to information tucked away in specialized pedagogic journals and conference notes. You don’t need to be a professor or Ph.D. candidate to use the service, but you may need […]