Preventing Online Mugging
When people try to describe what using technology was like this year, the word that will likely come to mind is “pain.” With viruses, worms, spyware, spam and phishing, running a computer — especially one with Windows — has often been a colossal headache.
Most Windows users could be excused for feeling they were never more than a few clicks away from an online mugging. In 2004, they operated in a strikingly different universe than people using computers running Mac OS X or Linux, who experienced an Internet blissfully devoid of malware.
It‘s Been A Day-to-Day Battle With Intruders
The two operating systems mentioned in the second paragraph are very functional alternatives to Windows. The Fedora Core 3 Linux distribution can be installed alongside Windows and provides a good out-of-the-box setup for the majority of common computing tasks. It is also free, in the First Amendment sense and the cold hard cash sense.
If you can afford the slightly larger upfront outlay of money, Mac OS X is an easy to learn operating system with very solid security.
If you are stuck on Windows, there are alternatives to the gruesome twosome of Internet Explorer and Outlook:
If the effects of Windows nastyware and virii were limited to the world of Windows users, I wouldn’t give a damn. I’d be happy to leave them to their own devices, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I get spam and intrusion attempts from Windows PCs that have been zombied. Good fences make good neighbors.
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