Latest posts

Rumor has it that Microsoft is in talks to buy Claria. (Also, Microsoft Watch tidbit here) How many times in the dozens of acquisitions that Microsoft has made has there been any advance rumor? Answer? Never, at least to my knowledge. I have been on the far outside periphery of two of their recent acquisitions, […]

According to a recent survey by SurfControl, computer misuse by men causes a surge in spyware on office PCs. Read an article here and here. The survey of 300 men and women showed that male workers consistently made more regular use of the online facilities and PC technologies that often act as the source of […]

180 Solutions is sending out 20 million notifications to users. 180’s official PR here. Here is what the notifications look like (apparently delivered in a popup): Click to enlarge Click to enlarge (Thanks Ben Edelman for the pics). The blogsphere gets busy. Ben Edelman writes about it here. Suzi at SpywareWarrior.com writes here. PaperGhost writes […]

So the major news yesterday was that Grokster lost. This puts the industry into a bit of a quandary. The Justices said that Morpheous and Grokster crossed the line as they were (effectively) promoting their networks as ways to pirate software. Good news is that the Justices didn’t negate the Betamax defense (referring to the […]

Major news. Unaminous ruling against Grokster. Justice Souter’s opinion. Well worth reading. Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer concurred.

If you haven’t already, take the “test” at Paperghost’s blog and see “where you fit in the adware battle”. Dave BoveSpyware Research Manager

Some will wonder why I bothered to write this blog entry. Well, I guess it’s my sometimes obtuse sense of fairness. Earthlink is swapping out WebRoot’s spyware protection with Aluria’s. Earthlink says the Aluria technology is superior. David Moll’s WebRoot disputes this, saying that Earthlink was “trying to buy a Porsche on a budget.” Guess […]

Eons ago I blogged on newer a style of scam from a company called “Grambest International”. You can see the blog here. It was a quickie blog which I put together, and I moved on, promptly forgetting about the whole thing. Today, out of curiosity, I checked what search terms were being used to get […]

Our good friends at Cloudmark (we use their antispam engine in our enterprise product) have a great antiphishing tool (free beta). Click here and look for the Anti-Fraud toolbar. In the future, we will probably put this toolbar into our Dell bundles as a freebie as well. Alex Eckelberry

In keeping with the zeitgeist, the FTC just issued a big report on P2Ps. It is a follow-on from their workshop in December. Briefly: • Consumers face risks when using commercial P2P file-sharing software programs, including risks related to data security, spyware and adware, viruses, copyright infringement, and unwanted pornography. • There was little empirical […]