antispam

Trend Micro Internet Security Pro is a robust security suite, offering users an incredible number of features. Included are not only the boilerplate virus and spyware detection and removal abilities, but also a firewall, data theft prevention monitoring, parental controls, an included Wi-Fi hot-spot verification service, security for your Windows Mobile or Symbian smartphone, and system restore, system cleaning, and backup features.

In the parental control and data theft protection features, the program will monitor outgoing information and block it from being sent, including phone numbers, names, and credit card data. It will also warn against dangerous links in instant … Read more

ESET's Smart Security takes the structure built by their popular antivirus program NOD32 and adds on two wings: a personal firewall and a spam filter. Because much of Smart Security is the same as NOD32, this review will focus only on the firewall and spam filter.

The firewall's advanced settings are Smart Security's strength. Users can extensively customize the firewall's behavior, but don't have to. There are five default settings: automatic, automatic with user-defined exceptions, interactive, policy-based, and learning. You can set safe zones, configure remote desktop access, and manage intrusion detection, all from an … Read more

Six Apart is launching a free, semi-open-source filter for blog comment spam.

TypePad AntiSpam is the same antispam technology that's currently built into TypePad, but the company is making it available to all who want it, with no charge and no usage restrictions. The service is in semi-beta: "The code is not beta but the (open source framework around it) is," Six Apart CEO Chris Alden also said.

There will be TypePad AntiSpam plug-ins available for Six Apart's blog platforms, TypePad and Movable Type, as well as for Wordpress blogs.

The TypePad AntiSpam framework is open … Read more

If you spend an inordinate amount of time deleting the spam messages from your in-box, you are not alone.

According to the Web site trustedsource.org, there were a total of 154.3 billion mail messages sent around the world Sunday and 117.4 billion of them were spam. For those of you without a calculator, this means that 76 percent of those e-mail messages were spam. That's slightly below Symantec's recent monthly spam report, which claimed that on average 78.5 percent of e-mail messages are spam. Maybe Sunday was a slow day.

Remember a few years … Read more

I spent some time last week talking with Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda Networks. I'd wanted to talk with Dean for some time, as I've been an admirer of the company for many years. Barracuda recognized the strength of open source, and capitalized on it, well before most people were willing to even give open source a chance.

The conversation was particularly interesting because of Barracuda's announced intention to join the Open Invention Network, as well as some research it had done on perceived customer value for open source.

I started by asking Dean, Why do you care about open source?… Read more

In part two of my interview with Matt Mullenweg (see also part one) of WordPress and Automattic, we discussed the release of WordPress 2.2, including its new widgets and Ajax-enhanced interface.

I asked Mullenweg what his favorite widgets were and although he said he "doesn't like most widgets," he did call out some of the blogosphere utilities like Sphere (review) and Technorati.

No conversation with Mullenweg would be complete without a discussion of the WordPress antispam utility, Akismet -- a service inspired by the young developer's mother. I also find it interesting that while Mullenweg … Read more