Robert Lemos

Tracfone, the company that offers a pay-as-you-go service for cell-phone users, loves the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allowed it to block users from hacking their Tracfone phones to work with another provider. Blocked them, that is, until the provision of the law that allows the U.S. Copyright Office to create exemptions resulted in [...]

[Read more →]

Search and rescue teams found the body of James Kim, a senior editor at CNET Networks, in the Oregon wilderness on Wednesday. My thoughts and condolences go out to his family.

[Read more →]

It’s amazing that five years after it sued Roxio, Gracenote is still dealing with the act of taking private a database built using user submissions. The latest news: After an interview giving his side of the story, Gracenote founder Steve Scherf apparently is editing Wikipedia to take out objectionable (and he argues, inaccurate) content.

[Read more →]

As I was scanning for news today, I came across this. I think it answers the question of whether people learn from history.

[Read more →]

Readers of my personal site and SecurityFocus will not see a lot of coverage on the PatchGuard controversy. I wanted to explain why.

[Read more →]

The fallout from the Hewlett-Packard board investigation has brought up a lot of interesting issues, not the least of which is how journalists should try and keep their sources confidential. The unauthorized accesses to journalists’ and sources’ phone-records underscored that in this day and age it is hard to keep sources anonymous.

[Read more →]

Many in the mainstream media continue call the alleged offense in the HP board investigation “pretexting.” It’s no such thing. It’s not surprising, however, even private investigators are still getting it wrong, because their mindset is still in the pre-computer age. Here’s why the HP case is no longer about pretexting, but about computer hacking.

[Read more →]

So if Microsoft is given the choice to protect its users from the latest flaw being used by online attackers to compromise their data and systems or to protect the latest Britney Spears song, which do you suppose the software giant would choose?
That’s pretty much the question that Bruce Schneier poses in his latest column [...]

[Read more →]

A member of the Mac community has thrown down the gauntlet.
On Friday, John Gruber challenged David Maynor and Jon Ellch to put their money where their videotaped exploits are and meet behind the local Apple Store to duel as only hackers know how.

[Read more →]

Defining success in your own life can be fairly straightforward: Figure out what goals matter to you and achieve them. However, for the competitive set–you know, the ones who ask all the milestone questions at high-school reunions–comparing your level of success with others is very difficult: Does my eight kids trump my boss’s vice president [...]

[Read more →]