About our staff
Editorial Director
Brian Livingston, editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com, is the co-author of
Windows Vista Secrets,
Windows Me Secrets,
and nine other books. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year at the 6th annual
Internet Content Summit in New York City on May 8, 2006.
Senior Editor
Ian "Gizmo" Richards is the senior editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He formerly edited the Support Alert
Newsletter, which merged with Windows Secrets on July 24, 2008. Gizmo reviews free software twice a month in the
combined newsletter's paid content.
Editor-at-Large
Fred Langa edited the LangaList Newsletter from 1997 to 2006, when it merged with Windows Secrets.
Prior to that, Fred was editor of Byte Magazine (1987 to 1991) and editorial director of CMP Media (1991 to 1996),
overseeing Windows Magazine and others.
Associate Editor
Scott Dunn has been a contributing editor of PC World since 1992 and currently writes for the magazine's Here's How section. He is the co-author of
101 Windows Tips & Tricks (Peachpit) with Jesse Berst and Charles Bermant.
Technical Editor
Dennis O'Reilly edited PC World from early 2000 through December 2007, ending with the title of senior associate editor. Prior to PC World,
Dennis (no relation to Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media) was a senior editor of Ziff Davis's Computer Select subscription
service from 1985 to early 2000.
Contributing Editors
Scott Spanbauer frequently contributes to Business 2.0, CIO, Forbes ASAP, and Fortune Small
Business, and was technical editor of Jim Aspinwall's PC Hacks (2005). He has also been involved
with PC World in one capacity or another since 1987 as assistant Editor, Editor, Senior Associate Editor, and is currently a Contributing Editor.
Susan Bradley is a Small Business Server and Security
MVP, a title
awarded by Microsoft to independent experts who do not work for the company. She's also a partner in a California CPA firm.
Mark Joseph Edwards is a senior contributing editor of Windows IT Pro Magazine and regularly writes for its
Security Matters blog.
He's a network engineer and freelance writer, and wrote Internet Security with Windows NT.
Woody Leonhard writes books about Windows and Office. His latest works —
Windows Vista All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies
and Windows Vista Timesaving Techniques For Dummies
— explore what you need to know about Vista in a way that won't put you to sleep. He
and Ed Bott also wrote the encyclopedic Special Edition Using Office 2007.
Ryan Russell is a quality assurance manager at BigFix Inc., a configuration management company.
He moderated the vuln-dev mailing list for three years under the alias "Blue Boar."
He was the lead author of Hack-Proofing Your Network, 2nd Ed., and the technical editor of the
Stealing the Network book series.
Becky Waring has worked as a writer and editor
for CNET, ZDNET, Technology Review, Upside Magazine, and many other news sources. She alternates the
Best Software column with Windows Secrets contributing editor Scott Spanbauer.
About our history
The Windows Secrets Newsletter began with the merger in July 2004 of two high-tech e-mail newsletters: Brian's Buzz on Windows, edited by Brian Livingston beginning February 2003, and Woody's Windows Watch, founded by Woody Leonhard in 1998. The two publications merged on July 22, 2004, and began using the domain name WindowsSecrets.com. Brian's 50,000 subscribers joined Woody's 100,000-strong list to form a combined, unduplicated subscriber base of about 140,000.
The LangaList, an e-mail newsletter edited since 1997 by Fred Langa, merged with Windows Secrets on Nov. 16, 2006. Adding its 145,000 subscribers resulted in a publication with a circulation of about 270,000.
The Support Alert Newsletter, a publication edited by Ian "Gizmo" Richards for most of its existance from 1998 to 2008, merged with Windows Secrets on July 24, 2008. Combining Support Alert's 150,000 subscribers with Windows Secrets pushed the total circulation over 400,000.
Today, Windows Secrets is also distributed via an RSS feed, and the site delivers more than 1 million page views per month.