Author Archives: ericlaw

Security Product Efficacy

I’ve written about security products previously, laying out the framing that security products combine sensors and throttles with threat intelligence to provide protection against threats. As a product engineer, I spend most of my time thinking about how to improve sensors and throttles to enhance protection, but those components only provide value if the threatContinue reading “Security Product Efficacy”

Family Safety Content Filtering

Microsoft Family Safety is a feature of Windows that allows parents to control their children’s access to apps and content in Windows. The feature is tied to the user accounts of the parent(s) and child(ren). When I visit https://family.microsoft.com and log in with my personal Microsoft Account, I’m presented with the following view: The “Nate”Continue reading “Family Safety Content Filtering”

First Look: Apple’s NEURLFilter API

At WWDC 2025, Apple introduced an interesting new API, NEURLFilter, to respond to a key challenge we’ve talked about previously: the inherent conflict between privacy and security when trying to protect users against web threats. That conflict means that security filtering code usually cannot see a browser’s (app’s) fetched URLs to compare them against availableContinue reading “First Look: Apple’s NEURLFilter API”

Web Category Filtering

Since the first days of the web, users and administrators have sought to control the flow of information from the Internet to the local device. There are many different ways to implement internet filters, and numerous goals that organizations may want to achieve: Today’s post explores the last of these: blocking content based on category.Continue reading “Web Category Filtering”