Brad’s Sketchpad

This week, the FTC settled a dispute with parasitic adware firm Direct Revenue, whose software, surreptitiously installed, bedeviled so many computers a few years ago. The agreement requires the company to pay a $1.5 million fine and get explicit permission before downloading software onto someone’s PC, something it blatantly failed to do in its first few years of existence.

Commissioner John Leibowitz filed a dissent and makes a persuasive argument that the fine is not heavy enough, given the pain and frustration the company caused millions of Internet users.

A few years ago — before the class action lawsuit, the legal assault by Eliot Spitzer, and the action by the FTC — I investigated the secretive Direct Revenue for a piece that ran on Newsweek’s Web site. Somewhere in my files, I have CEO Joshua Abrams’ angry letter disputing the story. If I find it I’ll post it. In light of recent conclusions about the company’s nefarious behavior, I’m sure the letter now appears hilariously disingenuous.

Password’s don’t cut it anymore. But neither does a new security scheme called SiteKey, in which users are asked to recognize a single image each time they log into their bank’s Web site. In today’s paper, I write about a new study, by Harvard’s Rachna Dhamija and MIT’s Stuart Schechter, which found most users don’t respond when their image is absent.
On Saturday, I tackled Motorola’s recent problems.

You can buy stolen credit cards, spammable email addresses and key-stroke loggers online. So why not the very foundation of all those Internet attacks - the vulnerabilities in software programs like Windows and Internet Explorer? In today’s Times, on the day of Microsoft’s Windows Vista release, I write about this potentially dangerous emerging marketplace.

  They make it completely impossible to read online, and they are dancing for no perceptible reason. The various illustrated characters (including those two-stepping cowboys) in the maddeningly omnipresent ads from LowerMyBills.com were driving me a little nuts. I was also curious about the company’s business model and how it was able to wallpaper the Web with its ads. I write about the company in today’s paper.

Yesterday, I wrote about the newest generation of set-top TV boxes from cable and satellite companies beginning to get a little worried about oncoming competition. Cross your fingers that we will soon have some choices for the most important piece of technology in the home.

When I joined the New York Times in November, I told one of the paper’s IT guys that I would be forwarding my work email to Gmail. He rolled his eyes and sighed wearily, as if he had heard that many times before. “Employees are not supposed to do that,” he said.

That moment inspired my story today: Firms Fret As Office E-mail Jumps Security Walls. Web email services like Gmail have gotten so good they are simply better than what many companies, concerned primarily with security, can provide to their employees.

140,000 geeks; 2,700 exhibiting companies; cab lines a mile long. I’m off to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which Damon Darlin and I write about on the front page of today’s newspaper.

Stickam.com looks alot like MySpace, with one big difference: users can communicate on their home pages via live Web cameras. It sounds harmless, but live Web video, for reasons perhaps known only to sociologists, seems to bring out the worst in people. In Tuesday’s paper, I wrote about stickam and other video sites stretching some online boundaries.