In an interview with Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer, the focus was on two specific features: phishing filters and EV-SSL support. Both Firefox and IE7 have phishing filters built in and turned on by default. IE7 has support built in for Extended Validation (EV-SSL), which shows a green address bar for authenticated sites; Firefox and Opera will in upcoming versions.

Safari has no phishing filter and Apple does not participate in the CA/Browser Forum, the group that developed EV-SSL.

“Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers,” Barrett said. “Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera.”

Barrett went further, echoing the thrust of VeriSign’s No More Abandoned Carts campaign, that the green bar instills confidence in users, claiming that IE7 users are noticeably less likely to abandon the login process. Confidence isn’t the same thing as security, but it’s not nothing. VeriSign says that similar effects have been observed by Overstock.com, DebtHelp.com, and now Scribendi.

There are plenty of different products for different parenting styles. You can lock the kids out of adult Web sites, control when they can use the computer, and limit their instant messaging to parentally-approved pals. Or you can eschew limits but log their every activity silently. Many of the products can send violation notifications while you’re away from home and even let you tweak parental control settings remotely. Which one’s right for you? Check out PC Magazine’s roundup of 12 Tools to Keep Kids Safe Online.

They did this using an abusive networking trick called “BGP Injection” in which they told the world that the IP address listed in DNS for YouTube was on their network. When YouTube requests came in to the Pakistani network they were, of course, not satisfied. The problem lasted about 2 hours before the rest of the world caught on and undid the changes.

BGP Injection is impossible to prevent and difficult to address, and you only see it if you’re looking for it. In many ways it’s the ultimate phishing tool. If the right people in Pakistan had gone further and put up a fake YouTube site to satisfy incoming requests it would have been hard for users to see the problem.

It’s not a secret, but it hasn’t gotten that much attention. Now perhaps a rogue network operator will be inspired to use this technique to its ultimate, malicious ends.

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Verizon, however, opposes the concept. I spoke to Tom Tauke, Verizon’s executive vice president for public affairs, on the subject. He said the company’s view combines a concern for the privacy of its customers with self interest. It may be costly for it to get into the business of policing the traffic on its network. Indeed, phone companies have largely spent a century trying not to be liable for what people say over their lines.

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“By protecting privacy, you can actually enhance security,” Brands says. “My goal is to get the best of both worlds.”

Maintaining digital privacy and security has never been more important. As more and more people trust their personal information to electronic databases, security and privacy are plummeting. More than 79 million personal electronic records containing data like credit card and Social Security numbers were compromised in the United States last year — almost four times the number reported in 2006, according to the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center. And more than 162 million such records were compromised globally, more than three times 2006 levels, according to Attrition.org.