Top USA Breaking News

The truth about oil

If you watched the markets today, it’s a big ol’ QED with regard to arguments that oil prices are being driven by speculative activity and hedge funds.

Last week, we could have immediately slashed the price of oil by releasing the Strategic Oil Reserves, hence killing the speculators. In the meantime, there is this argument that allowing offshore drilling will do anything to help prices, a ridiculous idea (all that will happen is oil companies will have leases they can use at their will, changing supply at their whim). Meanwhile, it’s a surprise to some that the biggest single exporter of oil to the US is Canada — almost double that of Saudi Arabia. The American public is the victim of a superb con job.

Whatever, I’ll go back to security now.

Webroot founder goes missing

Steven Thomas, co-founder of Webroot, has gone missing, and it looks very serious.

Our prayers are with the family during this extremely difficult time, and we sincerely hope that Steven is found soon.

(Steven Thomas and Kristen Talley founded Webroot many years ago, originally marketing a windows clean-up utility, WindowWasher. After Dave Moll joined them, they moved into the spyware category with SpySweeper and the rest is history. Thomas and Talley then cashed out after a large investment/buyout by a group of VCs several years ago. They are no longer part of the management of the company.)

New version of Sunbelt Personal Firewall posted

This new version has been in development and beta testing for quite some time, and is probably one of the most solid releases of this product ever, going back to its beginning as the Kerio Personal Firewall.

The biggest addition is support for Vista 32 bit (with 64 bit native support on the roadmap).

However, there’s been a lot of under-the-hood improvements in many areas. These include:

• Significant improvement in network performance
• Significant improvement in packet filtering
• Enhanced Process Injection prevention to prevent code injection attempts into Windows system DLLs.
• Numerous stability issues corrected in the firewall service.
• Significant improvement in overall product stability.
• Updated Intrusion Detection rules
• Updated translation files for multiple languages

The new version can be download here, and it will also be available through the “Update” function inside SPF toward the end of the week.

The completion of this major development exercise lays the foundation for SPF’s inclusion into a future release of VIPRE, our upcoming antivirus+antispyware product.