I think they’re just getting twitchy because they believe that Microsoft’s MSE will cost them business.

In any case, it’s more dangerous to not use anything at all. My first suggestion (you knew this was coming) is to not run Windows. If that won’t work for you, at least avoid using Internet Explorer; use Firefox or some other browser instead.

Do something

My original intention for this post was to end there, but I’ve decided to provide some more information. This isn’t entirely altrustic, even though I do hope you can avoid all the problems associated with malware infecting your system and feel sympathy for you if you’re suffering from it. In “It’s Your Fault“, I note that about 25% of home machines are infected in some way and are often members of botnets that spammers (80% of spam) and criminals (identity theft, site attacks) use. So, it’s in my, and others’, best interest that everyone protects their machines.

I list some specific products below, but to get started you may want to look at these Wikipedia articles. Although they are of vastly varying quality, the will provide you basic information and, more importantly, links to other resources: Malware, Spyware, Antivirus Software (a list), Firewall, Personal Firewall, Comparison of firewalls.

Some Caveats

Don’t expect perfection. One of the issues with any anti-malware product, whether commercial or not, is that protection is mostly reactive — some malicious software is released and the AM vendors scramble to create a detector and update their deployed software. No one product is “the best”, whatever that may mean; the better ones all get their moment of glory at the top of the ratings, but no one stays there for long.

Performance will suffer. Another issue is the abysmal performance that results from having all this network monitoring, file scanning, browser filtering, update downloading, … way too much of your computer resources are spent in this overhead rather than in accomplishing the “real work” you’re actually wanting to do.

Uninstalling can be difficult. Some behave much like the malware they’re supposedly protecting you from, being almost impossible to remove from your system, interfering with the installation of other anti-malware products, even crashing your machine.

Expect to be nagged. Some products nag you to upgrade to a more expensive version, or add additional products to the installed suite. That’s fine, I guess, but the continual in-your-face promotions with embedded ads and popups gets very old.

Suite or separate programs. Once upon a time, products tended to be single-purpose — a firewall, a virus scanner, etc. You could pick the (current) best of each category to install. Now, the trend is to offer security suites, usually a flagship module (say the original firewall product) with the other components thrown in as extras. You have to decide whether you want to go with a single vendor, or try to pick the best specific function from multiple sources. Consider how well they interoperate, and your tolerance for multiple sources of nagging (see above).

Stay up to date. This is the most import thing. You must keep your software up to date! The vast majority of products automatically check for updates; when you see an update notice, don’t cancel it; let it install. If you happen to use a product that doesn’t check, or for some unusual reason you have automatic updates turned off, be sure to manually check periodically — put a daily reminder in your calendar, for instance.

Free Software

Keep in mind that I don’t generally use Windows (although at the moment I haven’t yet replaced it on my EeePC 904HA) so I’m by no means an expert on Windows anti-malware packages. However, I have helped a number of friends and acquaintenances with them, and have to deal with Windows systems at work. I’ve personally used AVG, Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware, and ZoneAlarm. The others I’ve seen repeatedly recommended on the ‘Net.

In any case, you’ll have to do your own homework. These are just suggestions to get started, not expert recommendations. Try out these or other packages, check with your friends or favorite Windows geek for recommendations, and overall, just be careful which sites you go to and what software you install.

In this list, I provide a link to the package home page, followed by a link [(WP)] to the Wikipedia article about it, although most of the Wikipedia articles need some work.

Please feel free to comment with pros and cons or suggest your favorite package.

Anti-virus

• AVG (WP)
• Avast! (WP)
• Avira (WP)
• NOD32 (WP)

Anti-spyware

• Spybot - S&D! (WP)
• Ad-Aware (WP)
• Malwarebytes (WP)
• Spyware Blaster (WP)

Firewalls

• ZoneAlarm (WP)
• Comodo (WP)

Other

• ThreatFire (WP) - add on top of virus scanner; uses behavioral analysis
• ClamAV (WP) - anti-virus toolkit, primarily for mail servers (you can run it on your personal Linux box)

This reminds me of the fad for blow-in (or worse, glued-in) ads that were popular in trade paperbacks many years ago. (If I recall correctly, they were 90% cigarette ads.) They were made of much heaver stock than the regular pages and thus acted like unwanted bookmarks. The first thing I’d do would be to shake or rip them out. Arrgh.

Anyway, Levine says

Yesterday I said that the original motivations for adding new TLDs were to break VeriSign’s monopoly on .COM, and to use domain names as directories. Competitive registrars broke the monopoly more effectively than any new domains, and the new domains that tried to be directories have failed. So what could a new TLD do?

Levine lists several reasons for the new TLDs (among them “get rich quick”, the point I’ve ranted about before), concluding with

The only unambigous beneficiary of new TLDs is ICANN, whose cash flow will increase by $185,000 per application, and all of the consultants they’ve hired to do the evaluations because ICANN’s many highly paid staff evidently can’t do it themselves.

A commenter discusses how this also leads to the creation of a “Super League” and worldwide private monopolies.

For more on TLDs, check out CircleID’s topic Top-Level Domains News, Opinions and Blogs.

image: LionKimbro, Domain name space.svg, Wikimedia Commons

While there are some big Hollywood players involved with this project, the inherent problem with making a movie out of Asteroids is that it doesn’t have a plot, or characters, just a triangular spaceship blowing up some oddly-shaped polygons. –Michael Thompson, Universal to bring Asteroids to theaters

image: NASA, (253) mathilde.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

I’m a research psychologist who studies alexithymia, which is a personality trait that involves difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions. This movie creeped me out completely, because I saw it as a vivid illustration of an imagined alexithymic world. (Either that, or they hired terrible expressionless actors.)

Hey, I thought it was funny.

The city government in Bozeman, Montana, isn’t content to cyberstalk its potential employees—they’re now asking applicants for their login information for any social networking sites. –John Timmer, City to job applicants: Facebook, MySpace log-ins please, Ars Technica, 2009-06-18

According to the article, a waiver form asks “Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.” … and asks for username and passwords for each one.

Here, let me give you my car and house keys while we’re at it — I don’t want to make things difficult for you. Arrrgh.

The city of Bozeman, Montana has decided to back off on its requirement that job applicants hand over their logins and passwords for every social network they belong to. –Jacqui Cheng, Bozeman apologizes, backs down over Facebook login request, Ars Technica, 2009-06-23

Merely because upon reflection they decided they were wrong. I’m sure the “bad press” and “widespread criticism” had nothing to do with it. Idiots.

So much of what I do is intangible: mere transient electromagnetic disturbances in a wire or chip, displayed on a glowing screen, precariously stored on whirring platters, streaming tape — all susceptible to destruction by emp, power failure, careless shell commands, or obsolescence of technology…

In contrast, a book has a physical presence with heft and texture, a relative permanence, a durability that withstands inordinate amounts of abuse short of fire, flood, or wood chipper. Even if we were thrown back into a stone-age existence, a book would still be accessible, the only requirements being eyes and a sound mind. I can expect a book to last a lifetime, with no fear that it will suddenly become unreadable — the text scrambled or suddenly incomprehensible, the covers locked shut, or chained to the shelf unable to be removed.

I can scribble in the margins, tag pages with yellow stickies, cram notes between the leaves. I can leave them open at interesting passages, stacked, or spread out on a table or floor, for hours or days, immediately available, concrete reminders just by their location and arrangement what I’m working on.

Now, there are certain advantages to most electronic forms: compact storage, portability, search, copy/paste, etc. Unfortunately, that form sometimes is an awkward, proprietary, OS-restricted format that won’t last through software upgrades or passing fads.

But the most damning aspect of electronic text is DRM. Last year, when Microsoft nuked the MSN Music Store, I said “Yet another ’service’ bites the dust, leaving behind more consumers who probably thought they owned something permanent, only to discover that use of ‘their’ stuff was at the whim of some entity that couldn’t care less.”

I was reminded of that yesterday by Megan McArdle’s “Rethinking the Kindle“, where she commented on a couple posts by Dan Cohen at Gear Diary:

• Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head… And It IS Ugly
• KindleGate: Confusion Abounds Regarding Kindle Download Policy

The Amazon Kindle is a very nice device; I’ve been tempted to get one, but I’ve never been able to convince myself that it’s worth the cost. Experiences like Cohen’s reinforce my desire to avoid anything tied up with DRM. You can “purchase an electronic book” … but not really. What you really do is effectively “rent” the content, which may evaporate from your possession at any time. The use of DRM itself is annoying; the outrageousness in Cohen’s experience comes from the lack of customer support knowing what the restrictions are, nor even how to find out.

There’s a disconnect from reality when it is acceptable to tell a customer that the solution to your product suddenly becoming inaccessible is to just “repurchase it”. Arrrgh.

Postal Bulletin 22258, in a section about dog bites, says “Children are the majority of victims and are 900 times more likely to be bitten than letter carriers.” However, according to Dominus’s analysis of data from the Post Office and the CDCP, that would yield over 5 bites per child! He goes on to say that “So the correct statistic is not that children are 900 times more likely than carriers to be bitten, but rather that carriers are 6.6 times as likely as children to be bitten, …”.

– a comment on Lifehacker’s Microsoft’s Browser Comparison Chart Offends Anyone Who’s Ever Used Another Browser

The state gets $40 to $48 million directly, while vouchers to just about any constituency you can think of will account for up $60 million or so.

Now, I’m somewhat gleeful that MS smacked MS[FT], but I’m disappointed in that the bottom-of-the-food-chain consumers only get a few paltry dollars (either $5 or $12). Well, actually, they don’t even get that; what they really get are vouchers good for buying “any hardware or software”. While the article says “any”, I wonder if that really means “any Microsoft” product. Oh … I wonder how the lawyers made out.

I’m also concerned that by the time the bureaucratic procedures mentioned in the article are implemented and all the vouchers are processed, that it will actually cost more than the cheap vouchers are worth — unless you’re a bureaucrat, of course. Honestly, I wouldn’t go through the hoops necessary to get a $5 Microsoft voucher. If the $60 million in vouchers aren’t all claimed, the state will only get an extra $8 million — that’s an interesting provision.

Finally, now that this is settled, MS & MS can go marching hand in hand into the sunset dawn of a new day: “[Attorney] General Hood further stated, ‘I now look forward to working with Microsoft on helping us on two of my most passionate issues: stopping intellectual property theft and cyber child pornography.’”

h/t: WJTV (Twitter)