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Windows Security and On-line Training Courses?

Posted by timothy on from the temporary-education-discount dept.

eggegick writes "My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I'd have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don't think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view. Myself, I use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old Windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge, I've never had a virus or malware problem. Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and at this point she feels her computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers. Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have for running this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is, have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?)."

4 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Re:vmware is free by Tibor+the+Hun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Exactly. make known good snapshots and you're covered.
    It's the best way to run windows nowdays.

    --
    If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
  2. Re:vmware is free by isj · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Vmware Player is free. Vmware Workstation is not. But I doubt that for online courses that the extra funtionality in the workstation edition are needed.

  3. Sandbox software by bakuun · · Score: 3, Insightful
    While running a virtual machine certainly would solve the problem, I think it might be more than a tad overkill.

    Just get some sandboxing software (i.e. "sandboxie", which I've only heard good stuff about) and run internet explorer from within such a sandboxed environment.

    Just like a VM it will keep IE (or anything spawned by IE) from messing with the rest of the system, but with the advantage that it is much more lightweight than a typical VM.

  4. Re:Why would it make you cringe? by magamiako1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Completely terrible analogy to make.

    And yes, you can enable scripting per site. Or rather, on IE you have "zones". And you can set different security levels for each zone. You have your "Internet" Zone, "Trusted Sites", and even "Restricted Sites".

    You can add sites and change security settings for each one of these. Trusted sites typically have less security requirements because you trust them. And that would be the proper solution to this question.