firefox insecurity?

[Victor Odhner]

der.hans wrote:
 > A quick question for those who use m$ desktops . . .

I run XP Pro for a couple hours a month, mostly to load the security 
upgrades and format one newsletter in Word.  I don't hesitate to go 
back, but rarely stay for more than an hour or two.

At work, I'm on XP Pro all the time, with X to Solaris and Linux.  We 
use Outlook extensively.  Our sysadmins are very, very good.  Viruses 
and spam are filtered at the Mail Server (but I never expose my work 
address to the outside so I don't know for sure how good that stuff 
is).  I have never seen a virus scare at work since when?  Melissa?  And 
they do have laptops and wireless, but are very strict with them.  I 
have Firefox as my default browser at work, and the "ieview" plugin -- 
excellent! -- to pop me over to IE for a few intranet apps that require 
it, for example MS Project Server or (gag!) VSS.  Internally designed 
apps that have expected IE in the past are targeted for standards 
compliance.

I use XP Pro remotely at home, via Cisco VPN and rdesktop from Linux.  
It'll never lay a finger on me.   :-)

 > do you still have to run anti-spyware and anti-virus stuff all the time?
 > If you do run them, do you constantly find stuff that needs to be 
removed?

I am currently running PC-Cillin Version 2 at home.  I have always kept 
some sort of virus scanner around on Windows, since the time I got bit 
by the Monkey-B boot-sector virus from a friend's floppy disk some 10 
years ago.  We had only one family PC with four or five users over 
several years, but we were never victimized by any virus.

I run periodic AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy.  They never find 
anything, maybe one or two tracking cookies at the very most.  The only 
time I've had a problem was some five years ago when I used Webshots.com 
and ZoneAlarm asked me if some program in the C:\TEMP directory was 
allowed to access the Internet.  That was my encounter with Gator -- it 
never got off the ground, and I found instructions to remove it by hand.

My wife runs another box with Win98se, Thunderbird and Firefox.  Yeah, 
she uses IE sometimes too, but very conservatively.  She doesn't even 
have a virus scanner running, her machine is too slow (Pentium 166 -- 
but it was pretty snappy when it was running 17 hotel-shopping domains 
with 6000 properties worldwide under FreeBSD!  Such a come-down for a 
noble servant.).  I scan the box now and then, and do the MS updates.  
AdAware finds tracking cookies, that's all.

I mentioned this to my sister recently.  She said she had just spent 
several days recovering her system after it was wiped by a virus, and 
that she had been using computers for years and was no babe in the 
woods, and that she wished I would not be such an arrogant, superior  
blowhard, or words to that effect. 

I agreed.  OSS can do that to you . . .   :-(