Back Online

I'm just back from a taking the Great American Road Trip across the US and into the West. Something I missed as a kid, but I am sure *my* kids will remember this time on the road seeing the great green expanses of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota.

I expected it to be another week of security event news. And I was not disappointed.

I would never have predicted the rumored purchase of Claria by Microsoft as reported to the New York Times on Thursday. Crazier things have happened. If true this will be a case of total misunderstanding of online advertising by Microsoft. The legitimate (non-adware) advertizing market is $11.2 billion. My estimate of the adware market is $2.4 billion. Claria's so called behavior based marketing technology is *not* the way to beat Google.

An out of phase vulnerability in IE 6.0 was discovered by SEC Consult and announced by Microsoft. No patch is available.

On Wednesday a Data Security Bill was introduced in the Senate. As we see the House introduce its own version at some point this is going to get very complicated. While a data security bill will address a lot of faulty practices by “data brokers