Broadband Advisor

Qantas’ online booking site today breached the privacy at least two of its customers, with their personal details revealed to another party when they attempted to access flight check-in [[xref:http://www.qantas.com.au|information online]].

The Internet engineering community is grappling with what to do about a serious flaw in the DNS discovered mid-year, and the ongoing debate brings to mind a famous quotation from Voltaire: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

A Boston-area teenager has pleaded guilty to charges of hacking and placing fake emergency phone calls in hopes of summoning police tactical response teams to the homes of his victims.

Microsoft will dump its Windows Live OneCare consumer security software next year and instead give away revamped, streamlined anti-malware software that it's calling "Morro" for the moment.

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator Wednesday to help you add it up.

3 Mobile last week announced that it will exclusively offer the INQ mobile phone in Australia.

When it comes to children and the Internet, most parents focus on safe Web browsing. That's understandable, given that the Web can sometimes seem like one big Red Light District. But the Web isn't the only source of objectionable material online. E-mail can be just as bad.

The ability of malware writers to consistently stay ahead of those seeking to stop them has been a constant factor in the security industry over the past several years.

As more and more spammers are arrested, prosecuted, and sued under state and federal antispam statutes, there's one thing you can count on: Someone somewhere will invariably call the targeted spammer a "spam king."

What Gates, McCain and others have said about those pesky, unwanted e-mails.

If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

Microsoft's Security Vulnerability Research & Defense team (SVRD) have recently posted information online about the Cross Site Scripting (XSS) filter to be incorporated into Internet Explorer 8 when it is released.

No one will deny the global celebrity of Angelina Jolie. She's on the cover of magazines, stars in blockbuster movies and is a ratings bonanza each time she appears on TV. Now that she's had twins, she's got triple the appeal for some fans.

Bill Cheswick -- best known for writing "Firewalls and Internet Security" in 1994 and his earlier work at Bell Labs -- doesn't want to let commercial blogging software within hacking distance of his hardened Web server. A self-described Apple fanboy, Cheswick does want to host his own blogs, however, one about his job as lead member of the technical staff at AT&T Research and another about personal stuff, "if I can tell the difference."

By and large we have all gotten used to spam and unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). Even if you buy or build the best filters, if you are at all active online you're going to get at least a few spam messages every day. It has become one of those things that you can't avoid, like death and taxes only more irritating.

James Fallows, national correspondent for US publication The Atlantic Monthly, has experienced "The Great Firewall of China" firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship, and he explained it in a recent article titled "The Connection Has Been Reset." We e-mailed Fallows questions about how the Chinese government controls Internet content available to its citizens, and here's what he had to say (Check out our slideshow on the 10 ways the Chinese Internet is different from yours).

Educators used to follow the auto industry because that's where all the lessons came from, says Bala Iyer. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Google. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Iyer, an associate professor of technology operations and information management at Babson College, looked deep into Google's DNA to discern what makes it an innovation machine. Iyer talked with Kathleen Melymuka about what he and co-author Thomas H. Davenport discovered.

The launch of Facebook's Beacon advertising system in November put the social networking site in the middle of a controversy over privacy, as Beacon was criticized for being too aggressive and stealthy in collecting and broadcasting information about users' activities online. For that reason, few people right now would probably envy the job of Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer and the person most responsible for explaining the site's policies to the public.

Window Snyder has the somewhat offbeat title of "chief security something-or-other" at Mozilla, where she is responsible for overseeing efforts to boost the security of the company's open-source offerings, including the Firefox browser.

It's the front lines in the online fraud war: eBay and its PayPal subsidiary are the most-spoofed brands by fraudsters engineering phishing scams, according to research firm Gartner.

If you click Start, type cookies, and press ENTER, Vista tries to do what XP did: Take you to your Cookies folder, located at C:\Users\your logon\cookies. Except that the Cookies folder isn't there. What is there is a pointer that tells Vista where the real cookies folder can be found. Since Vista doesn't believe you should be privy to this information, it tells you it's not accessible.

Do-it-all suites are the name of the security game these days. Sure, you can gather free programs that cover the bases much as a suite would, but who wants to bother with finding out which apps work together and which ones might leave you pulling your hair out?

The internet of today scarcely seems the same entity as the web of just a couple of years ago. Ground-breaking tools for blogging, commenting, embedding video, sharing and championing content via sites such as Digg have turned the web upside down.

In the world of comic books, every bad guy is an evil genius. On the Web, hackers, spammers, and phishers may be evil, but they're not required to be geniuses. They can make a healthy living just by exploiting known security holes that many users haven't bothered to patch. Or by relying on the propensity of millions of people to do things they've been told over and over not to do.

There are many aspects to web security. You can hardly move for apps that automate online protection and safeguard your identity, for instance. But one area that gets less attention is IP-address tracing.

New exploits against VoIP continue to emerge, but experts say these demonstrations reveal the need for vigilant security and are not fatal flaws to the technology.

For the majority of those looking to upgrade to broadband Internet for the business or home, it's all about the extra speed.

Spyware ranges from the merely annoying to the potentially devastating, but our Anti-spyware guide will keep your PC pesk free.

If you have multiple computers around the home or office and want to network them together to share an ADSL Internet connection then this guide is for you.

Personal data stored on your computer is worth a lot more than just the hardware. Make sure you take the necessary steps to ensure you protect it.