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[CortJstr]

Green boards on all tests, according to those folks it's stealthy around here.

Inviso High Five!

::smack::

w00t!

[AlohaDawg]

I'm happy to report that this OLD machine with the EZ Firewall supplied free by my Cable Company is also all green and happy. Which makes me all green and happy.

[arkabee]

I'd heard that PC Conceal was a god among firewalls but that MacAfee claimed they aquired it to integrate into and improve their own product. But in reality they just wanted the competition gone because the code bases were so different integration was impossible.

they probably couldn't figure out how to use it...

and to add my "me too":

- outlook & outlook express are horrid security nightmares.  that said, i've run outlook/outlook express for a long time.  keeping up to date with AV updates, OS updates, and application updates plus disabling preview pane AND running something like zone alarm that's going to yell if something goes rampant AND generally being able to "keep an eye" on my system has allowed me to not (to my knowledge.... and that's nightmare inducing in and of itself) get infected/compromised.  And the fact that i have to list those caveats is the best reason i can think of NOT to use Outlook or OE.  Eudora is gem.  not sure about Mozilla stuff, last time i screwed around with that "stuff" was Netscape 4 on a mac. *shudder*.  Webmail systems (as much as i hate hotmail) are great in certain circumstances.

- if you are running a MS Windows OS, do your windows updates religiously.

- if you are on the internet, budget $50/yr for Antivirus Software.  (and to drift further... how "hide under the bed and whimper" frightening is the idea of MS "integrating" AV in future OS releases?  agree with whoever said "XP's firewall is horrid", it's better not to use anything than to falsely _rely_ on it to do anything to protect you. )

- thunderbird's preview pane.  i have no experience with thunderbird.  i should, but that's a long story.  it very well might be "safe", but given that it runs on top of an unsecured OS, and the fact that i personally don't like preview panes, and that to me preview pane screams "the application will now be doing things without you telling it to, so sit back and relax, we know best", i'd still be and would be and will be leery of it.  dependent upon how it interprets html, etc, or any scripting language or non-text only content i just am not sure what the app is going to allow to be passed onto the OS, which again has many flaws.

- i highly recommend the combination of lavasoftusa.com's AdAware and Spybots Search and Destroy, not just for the anti-spyware detection, but for the anti-malware detection.  I've had AV software go "wonky" and not detect klez variants, etc, and the anti-malware combo detect it and remove it.  it's free, it's a great additional piece of mind.

- P2P apps etc, and being "safe" by using a firewall.  whenever you are running somone else's App, you have to trust that they know what they are doing AND that they have your best interests at heart.  witness Kazaa, with embedded spyware.  ok, so you use Kazaa Lite, no spyware.  but, who are these people, and what does their application REALLY do?  At some point paranoia will stop you from being able to use your computer, which is counterproductive to using your computer safely.

but, it's important to never say "oh, i'm doing X, Y, and Z, there's NO WAY that i'm infected, compromised, etc." there's always a possibility that some new problem has occured, and if your system is acting wonky, pay attention to it.

[CortJstr]

- if you are on the internet, budget $50/yr for Antivirus Software.  (and to drift further... how "hide under the bed and whimper" frightening is the idea of MS "integrating" AV in future OS releases????  agree with whoever said "XP's firewall is horrid", it's better not to use anything than to falsely _rely_ on it to do anything to protect you. )

$50/yr?!

Supposedly the firewall will actually somewhat functional in this summer's SP.

- thunderbird's preview pane.  i have no experience with thunderbird.  i should, but that's a long story.  it very well might be "safe", but given that it runs on top of an unsecured OS, and the fact that i personally don't like preview panes

90% of the security of Thunderbird/Firefox is because they don't support ActiveX. Granted that's what a lot of malware relies on but there are still enough other sneaky tactics out there that I say No Preview Panes Period is a good rule.

- P2P apps etc, and being "safe" by using a firewall....  witness Kazaa, with embedded spyware.  ok, so you use Kazaa Lite, no spyware.  but, who are these people, and what does their application REALLY do?

Safe here is just a relative term. Running a decent P2P client like bitTorrent or eMule with PeerGuardian, Ad-Aware, SB S&D, an AV, and ZA isn't totally safe but it's the safest you can be. It's like wearing pads and headgear while wrestling. You're doing something inherently dangerous but taking all reasonable steps to lower the risk level.

[AugustWest]

Personally, I've always been fond of You Are the Woman (That I've Always Dreamed Of...), although Just Remember I Love You is pretty OK too.

[arkabee]

$50/yr?!

well, i pimp the hell out of NAV, Mcafee pissed me off in 97/98 or so with it's near impossibleness to update, but i'm sure it works i just hate it. i'd assume it's about the same price as nav.  f-prot, i liked, but haven't used in a long while.  the other ones, i dunno, i just don't trust 'em.  avg free is better than nothing, i guess.

what do you use and what do you recommend?

Supposedly the firewall will actually somewhat functional in this summer's SP.

i'm assuming this is one of those comments that in real life i would raise my eyebrow to and you would chuckle.

Safe here is just a relative term. Running a decent P2P client like bitTorrent or eMule with PeerGuardian, Ad-Aware, SB S&D, an AV, and ZA isn't totally safe but it's the safest you can be. It's like wearing pads and headgear while wrestling. You're doing something inherently dangerous but taking all reasonable steps to lower the risk level.

amen.

[slink]

Supposedly the firewall will actually somewhat functional in this summer's SP.

You trust what they say is functional?
Eeek!
If I don't trust BlackIce for their partnering with MS, I'm sure as hell not oging to trust MS themselves.

Plus, I still haven't dared try XP again. It was too scary for my utilitarian sensibilities.
As far as server I run Apache, so IIS can go fuck itself, and as for the whole media player fiasco of late - who hasn't switched to Media Player Classic, found at sourceforge.net?

[CortJstr]

well, i pimp the hell out of NAV, Mcafee pissed me off in 97/98 or so with it's near impossibleness to update
...
what do you use and what do you recommend?

I left McAfee for the same reason. I use Norton simply as the default alternate. But I'm confused because the main program costs like $50 but subscriptions are only like $10 last time I checked.

Supposedly the firewall will actually somewhat functional in this summer's SP.

Read "somewhat functional" as "not actively destructive." Having the current wall on actually hinders your connection and stops P2P's from connecting. I've heard from a couple sources that the Service Pack 2 version isn't a good (or even adequate) firewall but it also doesn't actively screw up your connections.

who hasn't switched to Media Player Classic, found at sourceforge.net?

This confused me. All versions of windows come with Media Player 6.4 still hidden (run "mplayer2" sans quotes) so how is Media Player Classic different?

Yesterday I decided to try out BSPlayer based on this recommendation but I haven't had a chance to install it yet.

[slink]

This confused me. All versions of windows come with Media Player 6.4 still hidden (run "mplayer2" sans quotes) so how is Media Player Classic different?

Well. Newer version of Media Player suck nastily (anything post 6), so they are best avoided. And Media Player 6 has negatives.
Media Player Classic is faster, more stable and less hassle than mplayer2. It isn't embedded in Windows which always helps!
It supports playlists and has many options not available in your normal player.
Take a look here


The other thing I was going to address, is a warning about Norton.
Don't let it try to fix a hard drive. If you ever have a bad sector show up in Norton, do not let it do anything about it! I have watched both Mac and PC Hard Drives destroyed because of Norton fuck*ng about with them, in various versions of Norton. This is the sole reason I have never used Norton.
I know you can run only AntiVirus, but I don't trust a company who have killed so many HD's around me!

And of course for DVD's NVDVD (easily cracked) kicks everything elses ass.

[arkabee]

I left McAfee for the same reason. I use Norton simply as the default alternate. But I'm confused because the main program costs like $50 but subscriptions are only like $10 last time I checked.

hmmm.  the last couple of re-subscribes customers have tried have been approx 30bucks.  regardless, though, my statement "i recomend budgeting $50/yr for AV if you are on the internet" is a budget.  if you can find NAV for 15bucks, grab it, ya?  often times staying a release behind can be far cheaper.

and, resubscribe online, great for a version or two, but after awhile nav2k1 just doesn't cut it, ya know waddimean?  i'm not a big fan of the online AV subscribes, because i've seen people get sooo pissed after they've formatted and not had tth cd. YMMV obviously and all that.

who hasn't switched to Media Player Classic, found at sourceforge.net?

me.  i use an old winamp.

[slink]

me.  i use an old winamp.

I am talking for divx purposes here.
I use Winamp for audio, unless mixing in which case I use the old version of DJS that allows individual apps assignable to whatever soundcard I wish.
Anything but Winamp just doesn't cut it for typical music use, but it just doesn't do for movie files for me. Not even the newer plugins and versions that support video. Too clunky for video.

[CortJstr]

I just installed the BSPlayer and it's dandy. Support for lots of formats, comes with 5 dandy full-mod skins and damned near every fuction allows you to customize two shortcut keys (and "out of the box" almost all the keys are the Winamp defaults). There's a dandy desktop mode in addition to full screen, about 700 video output options, and image capture in two sizes (full or WhatUSee).

The only three complaints I have are there's no FF or rewind buttons in the GUI (although changed the shortcuts to right/left works nicely), there's only one FF speed, and the seek bar is bit touchy.

Only the whole it shames everything else I've used.

[fanta]

Sorry to bump a thread from 2004,

but damn, this bears repeating

---------> everyone running Windows should install zone alarm. <----------

here's a review of zone alarm:

http://download.cnet.com/ZoneAlarm-Free-Firewall/3000-10435_4-10039884.html


I'm cocky, so I always assumed that since I know what the hell I'm doing, I can be fine with a NAT router (aka "firewall")

I've got years of experience doing tech support for Windows, Macintosh, Unix, Dos...

but no dice.  Even I need zone alarm.

One thing to consider is that any computer on your local network is a potential threat to you.  So if a friend comes over and borrows your internet with their laptop, malware on their laptop could potentially hack into your computer.  It's possible to configure some cheap routers such that all the computers on your network are firewalled from each other, but this is too technical for most people, and you wouldn't want to do this anyway in many situations because it would render useless, for example, your ethernet-connected printer.

and anyway, every friggin week, literally, Microsoft is releasing a patch for some security vulnerability that could let someone take over your computer remotely...

and besides... we install so much damn software on our computers these days that it's hard to say for sure that we can trust all the sources of all this software.  The other day I installed the 10 most popular video players on my computer, trying to get a stubborn DVD to play... Can I say with absolute certainty that all of these programs are made by trusted people who didn't slip up and on purpose or on accident let some malware get into their product?  No...

As for anti-virus programs... forget about them... Sure, run spybot.  It's free, and to be FAIR you should even donate a little bit to them if you use them, but come on... there is no need to pay for commercial anti-virus software.  The companies that sell anti-virus software can not be trusted, and some of their products even qualify as malware / spyware. 

This article explains more clearly than anything why no one should patronize the anti-virus companies:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2005/11/69601


Long story short, I was browsing my router logs for no particular reason, and I noticed that MY computer, not my roommates, but MY computer, while I was sitting there running no programs, had made a call to some IP using a pretty odd looking port number.

So I look up that port, and it's not referenced in the wikipedia list of ports... okay... so I do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP, and it's some friggin' cable or DSL modem in some other state.. I'm like... damn... I know I have no reason to talk to someone on a comcast connection... any kinda servers that any mainstream software products are talking to would probably be behind something a little more high end than that, right?  Maybe?

So I am a little concerned so I download and install zonealarm, something I've never done before, and upon the first reboot, it tells me that this and that program want to talk to the internet..  Well I told zone alarm to block literally half these programs, because they were programs that I use once in a while, but I don't want them using my internet bandwidth all the time like that, however small amount they may use, and more importantly, I don't want them sucking my CPU on boot.  If they think there's no internet connection, maybe they'll calm the fuck down every time I boot up.  The next time I want to check for an update to those programs, then I'll enabled them in zone alarm.  Or I'll download the update manually.

so anyway, zone alarm next proceeds to tell me that vservice.exe wants to talk to the internet.  I wasn't able to figure out from a few minutes of fumbling with Google if my particular copy of vservice.exe is malware or is some idiotic part of the windows OS, or both, but in any case, I disabled it in zone alarm and pulled it out of the windows/system32 folder as well.  Spybot doesn't think it's malware, but hey, I'm skeptical of anti-virus software to start with.  I know that if anti-virus says that something is malware, then it probably is, but just because anti-virus software doesn't know about a program (yet) doesn't mean it's not malware.

Certainly, aspiring to a reasonable level of security in an operating system like Windows is kind of a lot to ask anyway.. what with the task manager displaying nothing but cryptic names of processes to you... how the fuck would you know what is going on by looking at that unless you're a programmer, right... I know I don't know what the fuck any of those processes do.  Something as simple as alerting me when a new process rears it's head, or when an executable responsible for a process suddenly changes size... the windows OS certainly doesn't do that.

cloud computing is absolutely the only way that people will be able to have secure computers.

cloud computing with a thin client or something like that. 

Kind of like the old Minitel green screen terminals they had in France all the way back to 1982... from wikipedia:

"From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, and chat in a similar way to that now made possible by the Internet

Millions of terminals were handed out free to telephone subscribers, resulting in a high penetration rate among businesses and the public. In exchange for the terminal, the possessors of Minitel would not be given free "white page" printed directories (alphabetical list of residents and firms), but only the yellow pages (classified commercial listings, with advertisements); the white pages were accessible for free on Minitel, and they could be searched by a reasonably intelligent search engine; much faster than flipping through a paper directory."

Yes that's right... I'll bet the first minitel terminals didn't get fuck*ng viruses and pop-ups pushed at them every time you went to look up a fuck*ng phone number.


that was my rant for today.
thanks

[Mr Trout]

Zone alarm? are you fuck*ng serious? just rely on your router to block ports and don't click on and pop-ups that say your computer is infected with a virus.

[fanta]

blocking ports is inadequate security.  It's necessary to intelligently analyze both incoming and outgoing packets, regardless of what port it's on, to determine if you really want that data coming into, or leaving your computer.  Zone alarm assists in doing this by helping you know which program is sending and receiving which data.

As the article I linked to about the Sony rootkit demonstrates, "not clicking on popups" is an inadequate precaution, because there are innumerable other ways in which malware can install it's self on your computer.  In the case of the sony rootkit, merely inserting an audio CD into your computer was enough to infect it with spyware.  Zone alarm wouldn't prevent your computer from being infected with the sony rootkit, and neither would any of the commercially available anti-virus products, but at least if some rootkit starts keyboard sniffing your passwords or dumping your hard drive to a remote location, there is a reasonable possibility that zone alarm will alert you to this fact.

Point being, detecting that your computer has become compromised is much more effective and reliable than preventing it from becoming compromised in the first place.

Further, there are all sorts of levels of compromise that zone alarm helps with - everything from out and out malware that's using your computer in a DOS attack to more subtle things, like some random process that's innocent enough but totally useless and you forgot you ever installed and you never even knew it used your internet connection and CPU time to check for updates every 10 minutes or every time you boot up.

Zone alarm is just one useful tool.  If you install it, regardless of how savvy a user you are, there's a good chance you will find some program running on your computer talking to the internet that you aren't comfortable with.