Step one is to know what the dangers are, and sensational TV shows turn out to be a bad guide.A large government-industry-academic team has released a report on dangers to minors online and especially at social networking sites.You can figure out just about all their conclusions in advance by just ... Read More

The extensive publicity about this piece of malware, which has infected millions of Windows PCs, usually leaves out some things you'd want to know.For example, you might wonder how to tell if you've been infected. Symptoms include being locked out of accounts, being unable to connect to the websites of ... Read More

Here are some more university studies of voting machine security. The key quote, more important than the fact that they demonstrated a virus copying itself from one voting machine to another and therefore making it possible to compromise several machines by infecting just one, is While most critical systems are ... Read More

This is a good example of how a simple feature change can create a security issue, and why security features that seem unnecessary can be important in practice.Google's Chrome browser has a feature I've dreamed of for a long time. You can search the text of pages you've visited before ... Read More

Chrome will save passwords for you, but unlike Firefox it doesn't let you define a master password that protects all your stored website passwords. This could be OK. I worry about future occurrences of a problem that happened in 2006, in which malicious code could put up a login form ... Read More

Google accidentally pre-announced a Google-brand web browser. It's not available to try out yet. It's going to do some encouraging things about security. Google plans to "sandbox" the web applications running in their new browser, so that even if/when you browse to a malicious page it won't be able to ... Read More

I've written before about the limitations on the "certification" of voting machines.There's been more talk about it recently. Wired magazine's criticism of voting machine testing notes that problems go years without being fixed, and that the testing consists of going down a checklist that often has nothing to do with ... Read More