[Hidden-tech] Windows security (sic)

[Jonathan Dill]

On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 07:41 -0400, Sidney Mills wrote:
> If you don't have a virus scanner, how do you know you don't have a virus?

That's exactly what I was thinking--Not all viruses and trojans have an
obvious harmful effect, some just lurk on the system and infect other
computers, or send out spam or your private information to a third
party.  I'd wager that you have at least 2-3 trojan programs on the
system that you don't even know about, especially java-based trojans.

If $ is an issue, Avast Antivirus from http://www.avast.com is free to
use for "Personal" use, but you'll have to read their EULA to find out
what that means.  All you have to do is fill out a registration form and
they send you a key.  In some "lab" tests I've seen, Avast does not
perform as well as Norton or McAfee, but it does better than AVG from
http://www.grisoft.com which is also free to use for personal use.  I
have the Pro version of Avast on my laptop and I have noticed that it
also manages to catch some spyware that doesn't get picked up by Norton
2005 on my other computer.

I don't know what the percentage is, but there are quite a few viruses
and worms that get in through security flaws on the system without your
having clicked anything.  Some can get in if you have Outlook Express or
Microsoft Outlook installed even if you don't use either of those
programs.  In fact if you don't use OE or Outlook, it's probably a good
idea to remove both of them from your computer--both should be in the
Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs, OE is usually under "Windows
Components" and MS Outlook is usually in MS Office -> Modify.  If you
use MS Exchange server for shared calendars and contacts, you will need
MS Outlook.

That is why I would also add that the 2nd Wednesday of every month, you
should run Windows Update and apply the "Critical" updates, but be more
cautious about the optional / hardware updates unless you know what you
are doing.  I think this is called "Express Install" with fairly
up-to-date Windows XP.  On my own Windows XP, I just turn on Automatic
Updates, but I know how to undo things in case the update causes
problems.  I can only remember one time when I saw Automatic updates
"break" something, but opinions and expectations differ on that issue.
Personally, I would say turn it on, but be prepared to get help in case
something seems to "break" around the 2nd Tuesday of the month.

The 2nd Tuesday of every month is when MS usually issues Windows
Updates, but sometimes they don't come out until late in the day Pacific
time, so that's why I say to check on Weds vs. running it too early and
assuming no updates came out if it doesn't find any.

If you don't send and receive a lot of e-mail, using web-based e-mail
like Yahoo! or gmail is another good way to avoid getting viruses
through e-mail because the messages aren't even really on your computer
until you take an extra step to download any attachments.  Yahoo also
has a feature that lets their server scan the attachment for viruses
before you download it to your computer.  If you do a lot of e-mail, at
least I found web-based e-mail to be a bit slow and awkward without all
of the features that I wanted.

> The day they port Photoshop* to Linux is the day I finally, and 
> gloriously, leave the stupid world of Windows.  But even after that day, 
> I'll still be helping out people who thought that just by clicking "No" 
> they would avoid getting a virus, and now they're paying me $85/hr to 
> fix their computer.

Some Windows programs can be run on Linux with Crossover Office from
http://www.codeweavers.com (which is not free) but I don't know if that
includes photoshop.  Xandros Linux is a (non-free) version of Linux that
comes bundled with Crossover Office--If you aren't a heavy computer user
and just need web and e-mail, Xandros could be worth considering as an
alternative to Windows even if you don't know a lot about computers--it
is laid out similar to Windows and you can probably find your way around
it well enough if you are familiar with Windows.  Crossover does let you
run Shockwave on Linux fairly well, and the Flash plugin seems to be
more stable than the strictly linux version which crashes Firefox all
the time for me.

For office suite software, most Linux including Xandros comes with some
version of Open Office these days which is free and open source.  It's
not perfect, but is fine for simple word processing and spreadsheets,
and the new 2.0 Beta version can open most Microsoft Office documents
and display them pretty close to how they look on Windows.  There's also
something called Star Office which is not free, but personally I found
it to be a bit bloated and slow when I tried it out, and setting up
printing was a pain.  There are a ton of other free office-like programs
on Linux if you're willing to look around a bit, but probably won't be
as compatible with MS Office docs.

For 3D graphics software, including games, there is a (non-free) product
called Cedega from http://www.transgaming.com.  I have both Crossover
Office and Cedega on the Ubuntu Linux partition my laptop.  If I can get
all of the Windows software that I "need" to work under Linux, I plan to
get rid of the Windows partition on my laptop.  I think pcAnywhere is
the only program left that I really need to use Windows for, just have
to put some time in to see if I can get something to work under Linux.

Jonathan