Evening Dilwyn,

> OK, British-Rail style "wrong type of security" then.
:-)

We had the wrong snow today!


> Ah, so NOT the fault of IE itself then!

Yes and no. Windows is insecure. IE is insecure. Outlook [express or
otherwise] is insecure. All are set up with defaults that allow your PC
to be taken over without you knowing and used for nefarious purposes.

Outlook defaults to HTML emails. These can introduce trojans etc from an
email you haven't even read!

Windows is insecure because anyone can, just about, do almost anything
with all the files on the system. So if some virus or trojan gets in,
your system is basically stuffed.

Roy Wood wrote a long time ago about his "hatred" of the Linux/Unix
system whereby there was a root user and a separate 'you' user and root
was only ever used to maintain the system. A Linux virus cannot destroy
a system (unless you manage to run everything as root!) only your own
personal user account. (Contrary to Roy's blast that Linux doesn't have
viruses because it isn't common. It doesn't have them (or many) because
it is inherently secure.)


> Back to square one, round and round the infinite loop.

Hmmm. Infinite loop tends to imply that there is no get out!

Make sure you are firewalled to buggery, everything closed down unless
absolutely necessary, run a decent anti-virus (AVG or Komodo), get rid
of IE and Outlook (Opera, Firefox and Thunderbird) and pay a visit to
www.grc.com and check out all the things you can do to protect yourself
and also, use "Shields Up!" to find out exactly how secure your Windows
system is when on the Internet.

Alternatively, OpenSuse 11.1 is excellent! (I know you don't have
leanings in that direction just yet though!)


Cheers,
Norman.



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