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Welcome Back to the Internet
R. Alex Whitlock
I finally have an Internet connection at my new apartment. Unfortunately, my ethernet cable decided to up and die some time during the movie, so it took me a little while to isolate the problem. But it's working now.
The Internet was glad to have me back, too. I could tell. In the ten minutes I had to use Internet Explorer to register, The little Internet welcome wagon brought me a bug/adware/spam that popped up every five minutes trying to convince me that there was a problem with my registry and that I just had to go to this website to download their free registry program.
Yeah, like I'm going to trust these people with my registry.
What's particularly disturbing is that (a) it looked very much like a system message (it was
Windows Messenger Spam, if you're familiar with that) and (b) it very strongly implied that Microsoft endorsed their product. While it was pretty apparent to me that it was not on the up-and-up, this is a strikingly dishonest way of advertising.
And with gaul, too. If I were Microsoft, I'd sue their brains out.
Of course, if I was Microsoft, I'd be disinclined to let people send messages over the system messenger.
So what do I know?
Observations
That that follow my original link can also find some instructions and even a program to do it. That's good that Microsoft has something on their site as well.
Never EVER EVER EVER EVER connect a Windows computer directly to the internet. Routers/firewalls/etc. are a must.
Yes it's possible to secure Windows by making a lot of security changes, but it's a lot of effort. Even the normal "restricted" user accounts aren't enough to combat the evils on the internet.
Kavey,
Never ever ever connect ANY computer, PERIOD, to the Internet without at least a basic firewall.
The only exceptions are OSes that have firewall setups built-in, but those are, well, firewalled by definition.
Yeah, Windows has plenty of vulnerabilities, but so do the others.
Mike-
In my experience Microsoft Windows is the only operating system I've come across that is entirely insecure by default. All the active ports it's listening to. All the services running by default, and normal users that are still plagued by viruses and spyware even though they aren't administrators of the system.
Most other systems only turn services by request and have them disabled by default. And even talking about firewalls, even Microsoft admits that their XP firewall is not good, even when it is enabled.
My general set of rules to those that run Windows are #1 get a router (Zonealarm is decent inaddition or instead of a router, but i prefer a router) #2 don't use Internet Explorer #3 Don't use Outlook (and express) and #4 install antivirus (especially since AVG is pretty good for being free).
Although I'm sure there are plenty of arguements to the other side, I still believe Windows to be the least secure system out there. Yes other systems are not 100% secure (as a matter of fact there's only 1 OS to date that has never had a vulnerablility in it, it's by IBM and is written entirely in assembly), but Windows default setup is by far less secure than any other system I've seen.
Add an Observation
Comment spam is an ongoing problems that we're trying to address. Previously we required people to create accounts and log in. I am thankful to say that is no longer the case. We're giving Captcha another try and are playing around with a text-based Q&A variant of Captcha. So bear with us as we try to figure out how to best get a handle ont he problem. Please note that any comment on a post more than 30 days old will go into the moderation queue, where I will get to it when I can which could be once a week.
