A hacker has compromised the personal information and identification of as many as 32,000 users whose details were stored on computers at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. The computer system which was compromised was that holding all of the information associated with university identification cards, including names, photos, and…

A Washington state Court of Appeals has ruled this week that police do not need a warrant to access and search the contents of an employee’s office-owned PC. All that is needed is the employer’s permission. This in the case of an employee who used his work PC to access…

AuditMyPC.com is a website which offers a host of free services designed to help you to secure your PC. Using readily available diagnostic tools and your Internet connection, the AuditMyPC.com site will tell you exactly what security holes you have open, Windows patches which you are missing, spyware which is…

There are just so many facets and angles to this story, it’s almost impossible to determine if there is a right and a wrong, let alone who is which. Justin Ellsworth, of Wixom, Michigan, was killed last month while on foot patrol in Iraq. John Ellsworth, the grieving father of…

Earlier this week we told you that the former AOL employee who stole the email addresses of 92 million AOL users, and then sold them to a spammer for $100,000, was due in Federal court and was going to plead “guilty” to charges that he violated CAN-SPAM. It was anticipated…

Information Security Magazine, following extensive review, has published its list of the top security products for 2004. Evaluating products in a baker’s dozen of categories, and with a first, second, and third place in each (gold, silver, and bronze, respectively), this is one extensive and thorough cross-product comparison! Aunty particularly…

Jerry Smathers, a former AOL employee who first made the news by stealing more than 92 million AOL user email addresses, and selling them to spammers, is now facing up to two years in prison for his misdeed. Due in court in New York on Tuesday, it is anticipated that…

Forget upskirting and downblousing. What do you call it when you take a video of yourself during an..um…intimate moment – with a camera phone for chrissakes? How about this one: what do you call it when you take a video of yourself during an intimate moment with a camera phone,…

Aren’t those new camera phones so fun? Some of them are so tiny and cute! You can put them in your pocket, take them everywhere, take pictures of people without them even realizing… Whoops, hold on, because that latter can get you into trouble, maybe even into jail. There seems…

Jigsaw – it’s like the illegitimate love child of eBay and Linked-In. Jigsaw is a new start-up headquartered in San Mateo, California, that has decided that it would be nifty cool to incentivize people to rat you out by posting your personal contact information from your business card to the Jigsaw database, which seems to be the functional equivalent of the world’s largest business card Rolodex, cross-referenced by name, address, area code, and for all one knows, shoe size. If you have ever given your business card to a Jigsaw user, odds are that your contact information is already in there.

Cookies. Everyone has them. And everyone wants to know how to get rid of them. While for some browsers it’s fairly obvious and straight-forward, for others it’s not so much. Here’s how to remove cookies from those browsers.

RFIDs embedded in your U.S. passport, encoded with your identity, and able to be read at a distance? GPS devices mandated by law, installed in every single new car, so that the state can monitor your every movement and tax you based on the milage you drive? It’s not 1984, the Sequel. It’s 2004, the Reality. Both of these measures seem likely before the end of 2005.

As stupid ideas go, this one is a doozy: people have long said that one of the downsides of a Do Not Email Registry is that it would be such an attractive target for spammers. Well how about this one: the states of Michigan and Utah just enacted law to…

Users of the “Did They Read It” (“DTRI”) service run their email to you through the DTRI server, where a web bug is embedded in the email. When you open the email to read it, the web bug reports back to DTRI that you have opened the email, and where, geographically, the IP address you are using is located.

Much has been made in the past dozen days about Google’s announcement of their new service, Gmail. First, the press release was leaked on April 1st, leading to wide speculation: was it an April Fool’s gag, or was it not? (It wasn’t.) Then nobody could believe that the world’s largest…