authenticity

With its acquisition of VeriSign's authentication business, Symantec is making a big play for a piece of the market for services that validate the identity of users and content on the Web.

The $1.28 billion cash deal--the third encryption-related purchase for Symantec in three weeks--would seem to be a natural extension of its desktop and server security offerings, several analysts said. But other observers question how well suited one of the leading antivirus providers really is to become the identity broker for the Internet.

"Where's the synergy?" wondered Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner, … Read more

When connecting to a computer using Apple's "Screen Sharing" feature, you may run into a problem where the system pauses and shows the spinning color wheel and does not connect. The problem happens immediately after authenticating the connection, and usually shows a black "Screen Sharing" window along with the color wheel.… Read more

Social media strategist Shannon Paul, who works with the NHL Detroit Red Wings, said many good things on a SXSW panel this Sunday, but the one thing that stuck with me most was her assertion that brands need to become more “human” in order to connect with their audiences. She wasn’t referring to personifying a brand through a human face (be it an average employee or a charismatic leader), but rather to exhibiting ‘branded’ behavior that is truly human. What does that mean? What is the most human trait of all human traits? Shannon Paul posits it’s vulnerability.… Read more

In not-so-shocking news, iLounge is reporting that third-party headphones and headphone adapters for the new buttonless iPod Shuffle will require an Apple-licensed authentication chip.

This doesn't come as any great surprise to us because exacting licensing revenue from iPod accessory makers has become a brilliant way for Apple to add to the company's bottom line. But that "Apple tax," so to speak, does get passed on to consumers, and iLounge and others are now assuming that Apple headphone adapters will cost a minimum of $19 and possibly as much as $29. The handful of VoiceOver-compatible headphones … Read more

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him," said the great Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Apple, in toying with but not killing Microsoft in enterprise computing, has unwittingly granted its rival a new lease on life with Windows 7.

At least, that's the position Likewise CEO Barry Crist is taking in a recent blog post. In some ways, Crist depends upon neither Apple nor Microsoft killing off the other, as his company makes audit and authentication solutions that span different operating systems: Mac OS X, Windows, Unix, and Linux.

The company also makes awesome T-shirts, … Read more

Updated at 1:14 p.m. PST Friday, December 5 with comment from Lenovo.

Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending the month of December in his homeland of Vietnam and plans to file occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.

HANOI, Vietnam--Regardless of what some people seem to think, we Asians do not all look the same. But according to the current face recognition algorithm used in laptops, our faces are all about as flat as a piece of paper.

That's according to BKIS, the Vietnamese Internetwork Security Center that makes the antivirus software I mentioned in a blog post Monday. At a press conference here Tuesday, the company demonstrated vulnerabilities in laptops' face recognition-based authentication mechanisms that let anyone log in to a computer easily with a "special" photo of the legit owner, even at the highest authentication level.

Using your face as the password to log in to a computer--an alternative to the fingerprint method or the traditional username and password--marks a new trend found in laptops from Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba. As far as I know, only these three vendors currently offer this technology in their laptops. These computers come with a built-in Webcam that's used to capture and analyze faces.

I've been impressed by this new way to log in and have found it to be so much more convenient than the fingerprint reader of my Dell XPS 1330. The finger scanner is a pain when my finger is wet or dirty. Unfortunately, on Tuesday I discovered that this new and exciting technology may not be such an effective security measure.

I participated in a demonstration on a Lenovo Y430, running Windows Vista, and here's how it panned out:… Read more

It's a few weeks old but still worth pointing out as another recent example of "Disruptive Realism" - a clever twist on the slogan of the New York Times: 'All the news we hope to print:'

Good News! from Blake Whitman on Vimeo.

From the press release (linked to the Prankster group The Yes Men):

"Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's … Read more

Spammers are going legit, and they're using Yahoo e-mail authentication servers to do it, said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst with MessageLabs.

Most people use the Web interface for Yahoo Mail, which attaches a banner of advertising on the e-mail somewhere within the message. Yahoo also provides a service, Yahoo Plus, that allows the sender to use SMTP and traditional e-mail clients such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird. Mail sent via SMTP passes through Yahoo's servers, signing the mail as legit using the Yahoo Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) service.

What this does is strip out the usual … Read more

The MIT Kerberos Consortium, a security authentication and authorization group, announced Monday that Microsoft has joined its shindig.

The consortium, which launched in September with Google, Apple, Sun Microsystems and a collection of universities, noted Microsoft is coming aboard as a founding sponsor.

Kerberos aims to offer consumers the same single sign-on authentication and authorization system that corporate America has been using to allow employees to access network services with one log-on. Kerberos is an offshoot of MIT's Project Athena, which was developed back in the 1980s.

Microsoft uses the Kerberos network authentication protocol in such products as its … Read more