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20051103 Thursday November 03, 2005

My Windows background image

Since I am forced to (temporarily) run Windows, I thought I would share my background image with you:



It's a petri dish. Not much reading between the lines on this one.

What can I say, I had 8 spyware instances before I had firefox downloaded. I made the mistake of searching on google and downloading quite a few packages before installing spybot.

(2005-11-03 07:23:21.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/jclingan/entry/my_windows_background_image
Comments:

Notice how 'poor' Redmond's finest ware really is. Customers with freshly 'infected' computers surprise me every time. (100,000+ 'infections' will do that!) Hopefully, OpenSolaris will begat an improved SOLARIS software that works on my genuine INTEL based hardware. Fear not, installation of AMD-64 computing ware started last year!

Posted by William R. Walling on November 03, 2005 at 10:29 AM PST #

I ran Windows XP, without Service Pack 1, on a static, publicly visible IP address for over a year, without even running Windows Update*, and never got a virus, trojan or spyware. If you firewall the network interface before even plugging the cable in, install Moz/Firefox before surfing, and disable the remote assistance stuff, you've removed most of the danger right there. Then you remove the IE and Outlook Express icons from the quick start bar and the desktop, and remove Outlook Express from the Start menu so that visitors and family end up asking you how to get a web browser, rather than just starting up Aiiiieee! and instantly screwing the machine. :-)

[*old version of Adobe Type Manager that inadvertently got installed along with ancient version of PageMaker caused crazy probs when I updated Windows - took me ages to realise that ATM was the problem.]

So we've limped along with this WinXP box that drives my satellite modem for about 3 years now, with only Service Pack 1 installed, only Ad-Aware installed as a defence against spyware, and the only virus we got is when my father-in-law actually went to the trouble of saving a "please see attached document" trojan to the desktop from within Mozilla's mail client, just so that he could double click on the thing!

Hopefully we'll be getting ADSL in the coming months, so I can finally ditch the Windows install from the machine and put Solaris on it. :-)

Posted by Jason Ozolins on November 03, 2005 at 04:58 PM PST #

I just realised that my comment above came across looking like an apology for Windows, but it was really not intended as such; rather, that if you have to use Windows for some reason, you can save yourself much grief by being a bit careful and shunning Microsoft's web or email client software.

Counting the days until ZFS hits the public source tree,
Jason =:^)

Posted by Jason Ozolins on November 03, 2005 at 05:14 PM PST #

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