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Internet-initiated calls: It may be interesting to compare this to Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk, which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand.

Free VOIP: An option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get past any firewall. (This shows the alarming lack of security of firewalls, and the need for a software firewall like ZoneAlarm that alert you when a program tries to connect.) Skype is brought to you by the designers of the original KaZaa program.

3.5 cents per minute, but free to the U.S. caller: If you want someone with only a normal telephone to call you in New Zealand without paying, you can put $10 into a BigZoo.com or OneSuite.com account, and give them the PIN number. OneSuite only costs 3.5 cents per minute from the U.S. to New Zealand, if the U.S. caller calls from a local number. With OneSuite.com or Bigzoo.com can have as many accounts as you have friends for whom you want to provide free calling.

Other ideas? Are there any options like this that aren't mentioned here?

I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm just saying that some firewall products do more than just firewall. I have successfully used common sense and a firewall to protect myself from virus's and other threats that plague my familiy and friends. Oh, I also don't use Outlook or IE unless I damn well have to :)

ZoneAlarm Pro does annoy me every now and then, but I have yet to find a replacement that doesn't annoy me more.

Plus there are anti-virus products that won't let users run a infected attachement, (and alert tech support if you try) so if there are users out there punishing you by clicking on every infected attachment in a mail then a product like that may just be for you...

There would be the problem of attempts to take down the download site. With all the vulnerabilities out there, surely it could be set up so that it would dynamically change from host to host, maybe even use P2P technology. It would be in the interest (it prevents viruses by using a competitor's product: takes away business) of Norton and McAfee to block the "worm," so they probably would. New variants would have to be released.

Disclaimer: This is all a hypothetical, intellectual discussion, not an advocacy for it, nor an intention to carry it out.

Yep, been virus free on Windows meself. It's not very difficult.

Do yourself a favour, and use webmail instead of your own pop client. Let M$/Yahoo pay Norton and keep their virus clients up to date. I have never felt the need to use Outlook, Outlook Express. At home, I've never needed to store many e-mails, plus Yahoo has 6MB, and Hotmail has 2. That's good enough for most of my stuff. Course, I use Outlook at work...but if anything goes wrong at work, it's a a large-scale problem, so the responsibility lies with SysAdmin to make sure all anitvirus stuff is up to date.

I've just upgraded from Win98 to XP Prof. Now also using ZoneAlarm in conjunction with XP's built-in firewall, and also the multiple users feature which *nix users have been able to use forever(i.e. browsing the web from an account which has 'limited' access and not Admin. And that means that for the last 10 yrs at least, I've been totally virus free... C'mon trolls, gimme yer best shot! I'm wearing mithril...

"firewalls create problems while performing daily business tasks on the server from home"

Not a well-configured software one. It's not as safe as a hardware firewall, but it is a heck of a lot safer than running around with your pants down, not knowing when your machine is connecting and what it is sending. It makes it difficult to connect *to* the machine, but your home winbox shouldn't be a remote server anyway.

Grab ZoneAlarm NOW, and put up with a few extra dialog boxes until it is trained.

Furthermore, good Antivirus software will detect many trojans. Get AVG if you have alredy abandoned your AV of choice.

This must sound like free windows security 101 by now, but get AdAware and / or Spybot, and schedule a regular download / check for once every week.

For encrypting sensitive or old data, you can either use windows built-in encryption (which uses your user password, enable this now if your machine is fast enough) and / or pick up a (non-free) copy of Dekart Private Disk, AKA The Bat! Private Disk, a simple encrypted virtual disk creator. Anything you really don't want people to see should go here... Just remember to shut it down when you're done.

Furthermore, don't use I.E. and don't use Outlook. What many people refer to as "computer" viruses or "windows" exploits are really just I.E. exploits or Outlook viruses. Firebird, I mean, Thun... Firefox is a powerful little internet surfer, which while not as flexible as my beloved Opera (ducks), does render pages faster, is more beginner friendly, and is free. Thunderbird is a good mail replacement, though pegasus mail, Opera's built in e-mail client, and the non-free The Bat! are all good choices. If you want the most security possible, try Secure Bat. At 140 dollars per copy, it isn't cheap, but it does encrypt all of your personal files and utilizes hardware token authentication to ensure that you really are who you say you are.

Finally, don't forget to regularly back up your disks to something not normally connected to the computer. For simplicity's sake, I'd attach an external USB drive and run Polder Backup once a week, removing the drive when done. For a more automated approach, get a PC controllable X10 unit, and have it turn on and off the external USB drive, so that backups can be completely automatic.

you can easily use a free program like zone alarm to control all program access to the internet.

and i'm not saying that only idiots get viruses; my 2k machine has picked up a few, too. the second it hits my system, norton zaps it. the likelihood of being infected by a virus for which no virus scanner update has been made is next to nil.

You forgot to mention running a firewall. Zone Alarm is excellent and free. If nothing else, enable the firewall that ships with XP.

If you as a third move install third-party software for netuse (Opera, Mozilla. That kind of stuff), you'll need some pretty clueless people in order to screw the machine over.

Though be careful with something that has pop-up blocking installed. I've been trying to switch my family PC over to Firefox as the default browser, but the pop-up blocker frequently blocks necessary pop-ups on safe commerce sites. This can be very confusing. You click on a link, then end up with a blank browser window, because the data is presented in a (blocked) pop-up.

The fourth and probably best move you can ever do, is setup a systempartition with only the system and applications (move documentfolders elsewhere), and take a Ghost-snapshot. Then if they somehow manage to screw up, you're recovered in 5 minutes with absolutely no hassle.

Agreed, but also realize that almost all PCs from Dell, etc., ship with one big partition. So you have two choices: either reinstall everything from scratch, doing the partition as part of the XP install (a long and painful job overall), or buy Partition Magic for $70. Then to do the ghosting, you need to buy another utility. This is at least $100 worth of software, which is a lot to ask (20% of the cost of a $500 PC). Or do you know of some cheaper or free alternatives? I'd (seriously!) love to hear about them. What software do you use for this?

It's relatively simple to keep your parents surfing in safety. As many people have already mentioned, Firefox is a good start. But that's not where you need to stop. While Thunderbird is stil in alpha, it makes a nice email client, and has fewer glaring security holes than some of the more popular clients.

But where everything comes together is with the last two important pieces of software. I used to be a strong supporter of The Proxomitron, but it's very difficult to find now, and is no longer supported, so I've switched over to Privoxy which runs on most platforms, incidentally.

Privoxy is a local proxy that does filtering on all web content that you view, removing things like some ads, and all unrequested pop-ups. It filters virtually all malicious content I have seen.

A personal firewall is important to have now, and there are some reasonable free ones around. The ones I like take a bit of configuration, but they sure beat Zone Alarm. The two I use are Kerio Personal Firewall and Sygate Personal Firewall.

Sadly, both these products used to be completely free, but the same is no longer completely true.

Essentially, it is important to use a good browser, mail client, local proxy and firewall. With those in place a virus scanner is often somewhat redundant, though one of those might be a good idea too.

On the spam prevention front, I find Popfile to be an invaluable tool. It is, however, a wee bit advanced. I suspect that most parents wouldn't quite grok it. I've heard good things about SpamAssassin, though, and it might be worth the effort of teaching parents.

Some security companies do give back to the community. GRISOFT offers a free version of AVG Anti-Virus 6.0 for single home users. Zone Labs offers a free version of the Zone Alarm firewall.

Do you know of any other companies that offer free anti-viral or firewall software?

Some security companies do give back to the community. GRISOFT offers a free version of AVG Anti-Virus 6.0 for single home users. Zone Labs offers a free version of the Zone Alarm firewall.

Do you know of any other companies that offer free anti-viral or firewall software?

ZoneAlarm

Alternatively you can block any port on a Windows 2000 LAN adapter by enabling TCP/IP Filtering under the TCP/IP properties for that adapter. The way it works is you enable it which will block everything, then you must enable the services you would like to use.

If you have dial-up or do not want to buy a hardware firewall. Then download the free Zone Labs Firewall. It doesn't contain adware or spyware. You don't need the Plus or Pro pay-version unless you need all they extra junk, because they give you the full firewall program. Some cool features it has is it can block programs from accessing the net (Programs ask for permission ) and it has a setting where it hides your IP address when possible.

Not sure about Blaster but, that will still leave you open to a whole host of worms, viruses and exploits; many of which don't have patches/fixes available. ZoneAlarm (free as in beer) seems to consistently come out as the best firewall for Home Windows PCs in labs/test/reviews. I've been running it (on a number of different PCs) for quite a while now (over a year) and the only problem I've ever had with it was because one of the services it blocked was an RPC service (pretty sensible thing to block from the Internet really) which if you block the Microsoft DNS client in XP fails intermittantly. NB that's Microsoft's shitty systems design and not Zonealarm that is at fault.

Another good step is to install Mozilla as a replacement for MSIE and Outlook Express (or another mail client and browser if you prefer, I like Mozilla).

Stephen

Sure, no problem. I've been a Windows user for 10+ years and despite never using a single antivirus program, have never gotten a single trojan or spyware prog. How? First, get a good firewall; if you have a network router, that should suffice - otherwise, download ZoneAlarm. Second, find good alternatives for any Microsoft software you use that must access the Internet (in other words, ditch IE and Outlook). Configure ZoneAlarm to deny internet access to all other programs. Now just don't run untrusted executables (this means progs from Kazaa). Do all of the above, and your formerly insecure windows box will be virtually impenetrable, without ever having to buy antivirus software or even update Windows!

Internet-initiated calls: It may be interesting to compare this to Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk, which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand.

Free VOIP: Another option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get past any firewall. (This shows the alarming lack of security of firewalls, and the need for a software firewall like ZoneAlarm that alert you when a program tries to connect.) Skype is brought to you by the designers of the original KaZaa program.

3.5 cents per minute, but free to the U.S. caller: If you want someone with only a normal telephone to call you in New Zealand without paying, you can put $10 into a BigZoo.com or OneSuite.com account, and give them the PIN number. OneSuite only costs 3.5 cents per minute from the U.S. to New Zealand, if the U.S. caller calls from a local number. With OneSuite.com or Bigzoo.com can have as many accounts as you have friends for whom you want to provide free calling.

Other ideas? Are there any options like this that aren't mentioned here?

For people who use other mail apps that don't have the feature, here is a work around. If you're using the popular, free ZoneAlarm firewall, just right-click on the task tray icon and Engage Internet Lock whenever you are going to open an e-mail that looks suspicious. Obviously, no other app will be able to access the Internet at the time, so you can't have certain things like streaming media running. Also, I'm not sure if it would work with IMAP mail if your client has downloaded only the headers of your messages from the mail server.

Hello. ZoneAlarm is the best personal software firewall on the internet, and they offer a fully functional FREE version (it is NOT a timed trial). And no, I don't work for ZoneLabs. Here is the link.

ZoneAlarm

You can also buy a hardware firewall very cheap. I use one of these at home. Here is an example:
Firewall Router
Firewall Router

Good Luck, and screw Symantec!

If you want to block outbound traffic you need something like ZoneAlarm or Agnitum Outpost, both of which have free-for-personal-use versions available.

With a free, really nice and easy to use firewall like Zone Alarm, you get almost absolute control on your software connections, and therefore detect and contain (ad||spy)ware.

A simple popup appears when a soft connects to or is being connected to through your LAN or the Internet. All you have to do is click "Yes" or "No" and you even get a checkbox to tell ZoneAlarm you want this to become a rule.
You then have the possibility to browse through the rule list whenever you want or nedd to.

Real Player is one of a connecter, but WMP is one too.

While it can be usefull when the soft automaticly downloads necessary codecs, it is spyware when it sends your playlist, usage stats, etc.

And for the MIME part of the problem, I must agree that RealOne is one of the most annoying to configure, but a lot of programs are (I hate QuickTime for that).

It seems that the general computing public has yet to learn that a firewall is every bit as important (if not more important?) than good virus software. With excellent free firewalls available, it seems that the word must be slow to get out to masses. I get probed about once every ten minutes or so when I'm online at home. Examination of the logs reveals that (judging from the ports) most of them are malicious probes looking for zomby bait.
How can we educate the public about this so we don't keep suffering these casualties of war (now spammers have divisions of zombies too!).

"I'm buying a new mid-grade laptop computer, which I plan to dual-boot between Windows XP Home and Mandrake 9.x. Before its arrival in a few weeks I'm trying to think of what 'essential' software I'll need to make a usable home system. In general I'd like to spend as little money as possible (free is good). As far as my needs, think 'typical family PC' without an emphasis on gaming. I know I can get something like Open Office for word processing, presentation, etc. needs, but is there such a good thing as a good free virus checker? A good free email client? A handy web browser? What would you consider the top 10 (or so) pieces of software for a new home system, bearing in mind that I need software for both the Windows and Linux side of things?""

These are the files I keep on my "Esential CDs" that I bring around to help out other non-techs (Windows users) people. (Of course because they are financially broke after paying $200 for their Operating System, they want everything else to be free.) ;-)

Anti-Virus: The best free antivirus program I have found AVG Anti-Virus 6.0

Office Suite: (Word Processing, SpreadsThe quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped off the edge. The quick brown fox ran off with all his toysheet, Slideshows, etc.)
Open Office 1.1

CD/DVD data/audio Burner: (and doubles as a CD image creator .ISO and .CUE)
BurnAtOnce 0.99a

CD/DVD image loader/emulator (perfect for people who often misplace their CDs): (loads .ISO, .CUE, .CCD, .CDI etc. files without burning them)
DAEMON Tools 3.41

MultiMedia Player (Mpeg, Mp3, AVI, etc.)Winamp Classic 2.91

or for audio only Foobar 2000 0.7

Zip Extractor:Ultimate Zip or7 Zip 3.11

Download Accelerator:Star Downloader v1.42

Internet Browser: (other than IE) Mozilla 1.4 or Opera 6.20

System Statistics: (Motherboard, Memory, BIOS, Video, Software info, etc)AIDA32 3.80

E-mail (other than Outlook Express)Thunderbird 0.2 or Pegasus Mail 4.12

Spyware/Adware killer:Ad-aware 6 or Spybot Search & Destroy 1.2

Pop-up Killer/Browser Enhancer (for IE)Google Toolbar 2.0.102

PDF document reader:Adobe Acrobat 6.0

FTP program (other than IE and the command line FTP)Winsock FTP LE 5.08 or FileZilla 2.2.1

Internet Chat Programs (other than Windows Messenger)Gaim 0.70or Trillian Basic 0.74E

Firewall Software:ZoneAlarm 3.7.211

or if you have Highspeed Internet, a spare 200mhz PC, and two network cards laying around...ClarkConnect 2.0

CD Ripper / MP3 Creator CDex 1.51

Graphics Editor (other than Paint) The Gimp

Graphics viewer (other

• CygWin. The Linux-like environment for Windows.
  Mozilla. Use this for mail, news, and browsing if you like.
  Firebird. for FAST browsing.
  WS FTP Light. A FREE, FTP client that works great.
  Filezilla. which is TRULY free and does sftp as well.
  PuTTY. a free SSH client for Windows.
  TTSSH. is a much less clunky ssh client than PuTTY.
  iXplorer. freeware secure FTP client
  VNC hello!? remote controll software.
  Tight VNClike the original, only FAST.
  GNU-EMacs for Windows. just trust me ;).
  Dev-C++a free C++ compiler for those who can't afford VS.
  NetHack. as someone here said, you MUST have NetHack installed on everything...
  Free-AV.free Anti-Virus software for Windows, (mandatory these days). or
  AVG Free edition. another free Anti-Virus software for Windows.
  Zonealarm. my favorite Personal Firewall,, really!. or
  Kerio. another firewall that some seem to like. or
  Sygate. yet another firewall. whatever floats your boat.
  Boingo. to see where the closest hotspot is, hehe.
  OpenOffice 1.1 the Microsoft Office KILLER :) {really!}
  Winamp 2.x for audio/video usage in Windows, stay away from the new one :).
  Mark's Adding Machine is much better than the Windows calculator.
  SpyBot Search & Destroy The best Ad-ware / Spyware removal tool we've found, "IE is unusable without".
  Ad-Aware another spy-ware app "alas poor Windoze."
  Trillian a favorite IM, since we're all chatters @ heart. or
  GAIM since trillian hogs resources, "bad piggy!".
  Gimp image creation/editing. Who needs Photoshop anyway?
  EnZip freeware Zip Utility, Stop nagging you WinZip!!
  Iview is a great little image viewer. or
  Irfanviewone of the best image viewer out there for Windows.
  Audacity is a great little sound editor.
  Virtual Dub. a great video editor.
  cDex gotta rip those cd's for the RIAA!
  MAME for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. and finally
  XPantiSPY since XP is E-V-I-L.

And FINALLY, don't trust me! Trust the experts;

Go to the Pricelessware site maintained by the alt.comp.freeware Usenet group.
The

I can only give you my top 10 and hope it ties in with other peoples:

Anti Virus - AVG - Updated regularly and free for non commercial use - FREE
Browser - Mozilla - A stable and standards compliant browser, and not tied in with the OS unlike IE! - FREE
Compression - PowerArchiver - Freeware ZIP/RAR/CAB/LHA/TAR/etc/etc! - FREE
Security - ZoneAlarm - For piece of mind when connected - FREE
Email - MailWasher - Eliminate spam without downloading to your computer - FREE
Registry - RegCleaner - An invaluable registry tool - FREE
MP3 - WinAmp - Still my fav MP3 player after all these years - FREE
MPEG - VLC - A very comprehensive media player - FREE
CD - Daemon Tools - A CD emulator, once a gamer has used this they never uninstall it! - FREE
Games - MAME - An arcade emulator... essential for people over the age of 25! - FREE
FTP & Download - LeechFTP - Unintrusive, easy to use, hard to crash (unlike BPFTP) - FREE


Well thats my two penneth anyway :o)

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

Mozilla, powerful and free web browser/mail suite.
OpenOffice, powerful office suite.
Ad-Aware for keeping spyware (Gator etc) out.
BitTorrent for all your P2P needs.
ZomeAlarm a good firewall.
Avast! Antivirus good AV app, free for home use.
TextPad powerful and easy-to-use text editor.
SmartFTP powerful and free FTP client.

On top of these, I always install these non-free apps (non-development related):
Paint Shop Pro all the relevant functionality from Photoshop at a much better price.
Klient the best IRC client. Ever.

Some people have mentioned:
CygWin - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it
VNC - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it, and it has security issues
Dev-C++ - not needed on a home PC, it's for development.
NetHack - huh!?
Boingo - the article submitter didn't mention anything about having a WLAN card, so why would he need to find hotspots?
Winamp - redundant since Microsoft released WMP9, which I've found to be just as fast, more stable than WA3, and better at playing movies. Of course, YMMV, and some people prefer to stay away from MS stuff for ideological reasons.

AVG Free edition

Zonealarm

Winamp Classic

..they are the first things I install.

Openoffice and Zonealarm.

Riddle me this: You decide to upgrade your old Windows 98 to Windows 2000 because it's so much better than Windows 98 was. If you are on a telephone line, dialing up to your AOL account, how are you supposed to get your system patched (in the THREE HOURS it takes to download and install ONLY THE CRITICAL UPDATES) before some cheeze-head hits your system with one of the umpteen remote exploits that you are vulnerable to?

Ok. First, enable WinXP's built in firewall. For bonus points, download Zonealarm. Then, go directly to the windows update site. Do not pass go. Do not look at porn. Do not go on IRC and declare that you are uber 31337 and no one can hax0r you. Start the update process, and go to bed, get some cola, whatever. When it (finally) finishes, install the updates, reboot when asked, and there you have it, a fully patched Windows machine. If you're really smart, you'll keep the firewall and disable all unneccessary services, too.

So I guess the first question that comes to my mind is, will a products such as ZoneAlarm stop this? And if so ... will any penalties result from blocking?

Kinda like Tripwire , Symantec Anti-Virus, RedHat Enterprise Linux's dymanic relocatable address to fight worms, OpenBSD StackGhost and ZoneAlarm Firewall all rolled in one.

Once implemented, we should see a dramatic change in the network security world; less IDS/IPS/IDPS business model.

The last frontier would then be the social hacking engineering prevention.

Mark Mah Words

The difference is that a real firewall (Like Zone Alarm or Sygate (free is down at the bottom)) will block the traffic, prompt you to allow/disallow it, and then follow instructions.

Black Ice, on the other hand, will simply watch ports, log traffic, and when someone tries to access your RPC port or whatnot, it simply sets a flag "Serious Error - Someone Hacking" and starts blinking in the system tray. No real response, no ability to block it in the future, just simple monitoring.

In other words, it's a complete waste of CPU cycles from a security standpoint, and if you're using it for traffic monitoring you'd be better served with Ethereal.

sure there is, you can find it here.

And of course, for the Windows users, there's our free friend Zone Alarm to help put another layer between your machine and the bad ol' Internet.

DT

Sounds like MSBlaster.

Once you've cleaned out her machine, get the ZoneAlarm firewall on it, this came in via Windoze Messaging on port 135.

usual disclaimers

For companies: Insist on using open source software. If you can't use open source, build it internally. If you can't build it internally, hire people. If you can't do any of that, then expect to have concerns about security unanswered for the foreseeable.

For end users: Use open source software. If you can't use OSS for everything then make sure you have a good firewall of some kind (everyone in Windowsland seems to be using ZoneAlarm Pro from what I hear). The most important thing however is simply to read everything and assume nothing.

For everyone: get a good firewall. Keep an eye on your traffic.

If someone's scanning your stuff and poking their nose around you'll see it and know about it. Be sure to tell your friends how disreputable the software provider in question is and post an embittered rant about it on /.

Can't we all just get along?

Most Windows users will know that something is wrong when "svchost" constantly crashes, prompting for a reboot. The hits on port 135 cause it to bork out. My mom, who is quite "computer illiterate", knew that something was wrong, and called me about it. We corrected the problem by upgrading her virus definitions (which were only a week out of date), and installed ZoneAlarm Free on her machine to stealth the ports from now on.

GRISoft's AVG Antivirus, and ZoneAlarm, are two great and free tools that can fix and prevent these things.

AVG Anti-Virus
Zone Alarm

A year or two ago, I wouldn't have thought that firewalls were so essential for dial-up users. Now, it's important for all users to have them, regardless of the OS.

Black Ice Defender
Zone Alarm

Oh you mean why didn't they bundle a free one?

Well since Microsoft tweaked free code bought and paid for by taxpayers and gave it back to their customers for free, and then found out that was illegal, I'm not so sure they'd be so quick to so flagrently dare the states to sue them again.

Probably why the XP personal firewall is so limited. But there's always IAS!

(Better yet)

To whom it may concern:
Why aren't you blocking stupid useless open ports from the Internet? There are freely available tools if you insist on running Windows. Then again, most electronics stores sell standalone broadband firewall/routers. If you used one of those, you could take your time and patch whenever you feel like it...

I tell all those in my circle of influence: never connect to the Internet without a firewall in place. It makes no difference what your host OS is. At the least, you should be running a host-based firewall like Zone Alarm or ipchains/ipfilter/etc. Even better is a standalone box that does nothing but firewall. It's just prudence...even on a simple home PC or LAN.

A friend of mine called me about 3 hours ago saying that her brand new Windows XP notebook kept rebooting with some strange message about RPC. I had her download the free version of ZoneAlarm and that blocked the worm and let her stay online long enough to download the patch. If you know somebody that's getting hammered, have them give ZoneAlarm a shot.

• AVG AntiVirus
• ZoneAlarm and
• Ad-aware

use emule to download files in a distributed fashion. It is almost impossible to get a malicious file this way. Especialy if you hang out on web sites that post hashes of known good files. Emule also supports lists to block networks run by people that attack P2P file sharing clients.

If you have a virus scanner and software firewall, it is smooth sailing. Just throw in a cheap CD burner to save your downloads!

...beats a pound of medication (or something like that - I'm not to good at english proverbs).

Don't run attachments from mails if you don't trust the sender. Do get a firewall that lets you block both ways (ZoneAlarm from ZoneLabs is my free favorite).The result? You won't get caught by this trojan, and if you should break the first rule of thumb, the second won't turn your PC into a spam-factory.

...beats a pound of medication (or something like that - I'm not to good at english proverbs).

Don't run attachments from mails if you don't trust the sender. Do get a firewall that lets you block both ways (ZoneAlarm from ZoneLabs is my free favorite).The result? You won't get caught by this trojan, and if you should break the first rule of thumb, the second won't turn your PC into a spam-factory.

Installing ZoneAlarm is not enough. You must go to Security/Local/Customize in ZoneAlarm and select "block incoming NetBIOS".

Buying the advertised product would stop it just for you, but would encourage the spammer further, making it worse for everyone else. Instead, get a free firewall like ZoneAlarm and stop it that way.

It seems to me that, if you are using Windows XP and a hardware firewall, it is better to use the ZoneAlarm software firewall. Then you can run VisualZone, and quickly see whether anything has gotten through your hardware firewall. Don't worry about ZoneAlarm's RAM use. RAM is cheap.

ZoneAlarm works well with Windows XP. It is necessary to disable Microsoft's firewall, of course; you don't want the wolf to guard the henhouse. (See the section Windows XP connects to Microsoft's computers in at least 17 ways. in the article, Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going..)

A lot of us need to run programs that don't have Linux or BSD versions. For us, Microsoft has an absolute monopoly. It's hopeless being involved in adversarial behavior with Microsoft. The company has $40 billion cash in the bank. I have ... (Looks in billfold... Moth flies out.)

One way to cope with the situation is to use two computers connected to one keyboard, mouse and monitor. Run Mozilla on Linux on a computer that is connected to the Internet. Disable internet access on the other computer running Windows XP by removing the TCP/IP protocol. Use another protocol, such as NETBEUI, for file sharing. (IOGear seems to make the best KVM switch. My experience has been that there is no video degradation with IOGear KVMs.)

My experience, and the experience of others, is that Windows XP doesn't crash, it just becomes less usable. Windows XP becomes shaky when enough programs are loaded that all of the installed memory is in use. There are other situations where Windows XP begins malfunctioning, but these are not well characterized. (Can anyone help me here?) The symptoms of the malfunction are slowness to respond to the keyboard, and disk thrashing caused by virtual memory use that sometimes takes 45 seconds or more.

The consensus seems to be, however, that Windows XP is Microsoft's best OS. The only other candidate is Windows 2000. Any comments?

The single biggest cause of instability in a system that was once stable is bad connections. Just open up the case, pull out all connectors and adapter cards a few millimeters, and push them back. That cleans the contacts.

(Download ZoneAlarm FREE for personal use.)

Ad-Aware is excellent for use with Windows XP. It gives a list of all running processes, who made the software, and where it is located on the hard drive. It's main purpose is to check for spyware. (Virus program software does not check for spyware, so you need a separate program.)

In Portland, Oregon, USA, the best Internet connection is Hevanet DSL with a Cisco 675 router from the phone company, Qwest. The Cisco 675 can be put into mode in which it is a true hardware firewall, not just a NAT device. (My only connection with Hevanet is as a satisfied customer.)

is why on my computer, IE doesn't even have permission to get through ZoneAlarm

Actually they do have your data. If you preview any e-mail they typically have something like

<img src=/spamcity/tracker.pl?id=177729299>

Where 177729299 is your personal id number.

This won't give spammers what they'd need to make a Bayesian filter work to get past other Bayesian filters, though. Some of the most important information a good Bayesian filter gets is not from your spam, but from your legitimate email. A good Bayesian filter notes who you routinely correspond with and what you talk about, and uses that information to prevent false positives. That means that it can go aggressively after stuff that looks like spam and not worry too much about catching legitimate email.

Still, tracking codes and other such stuff is why users should:

1. Get an email program that doesn't open links or display images automatically.
2. Install a good software firewall, like ZoneAlarm or Kerio , and configure it to block this cr*p.
3. Install Proxomitron to filter out what gets past the firewall.

Computer security and privacy can be enhanced considerably by taking a number of relatively simple measures.

his recovery disks are nothing more than hard drive images. He can reinstall Windows and MSOffice in ten minutes.

And how long does it take to install the rest of the applications (virus checker, firewall, compiler, decent RGB image editor, non-bloated media player, etc) that are either obviated in the UNIX architecture or installed with Mandrake?

And how long does it take to backup the user's data and restore it after re-installation? Most of the computers that come with Ghost restore disks do not use a separate partition for My Documents; they just wipe out all the user's precious data on re-install.

Not that you can't block the banner ads, too, but that's more work.