h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a confession to make. I have an unsecured wireless network.

I'm told that this is A Bad Thing. Apparently people might come and sit outside my home and do all sorts of naughty things - and the police won't believe me when I say it wasn't me.

On the other hand...cast your mind back a few years when wifi weas just coming in. You were meant to stick an transmitter on your roof and give away your bandwidth for free. If enough folk did it, we'd be able to get connected anywhare in a built up area. 'Dataclouds' they called it.

Pah, antivirus, get a Mac. (okay i should probably put some flavour of antivirus on the ShinyMac, but i dont know what kind)

mini

Clam is AV for Macs. And other OSs - pretty good apparently.
Mostly Macs are protected in that there ain't enough of them in general use. The scammers and teenage loners have more than enough windows machines to play with!

Unsecured wireless - there was a case recently where someone was using unsecured wireless for nefarious purposes and the owners were the ones initially investigated but police soon realised it wasn't them.

I believe the BT hub stuff automatically allows other BT wireless users in the area to piggyback it and you can;t do much about it.

I think there's two issues that confuse the wirless security legality issue.

One is that in some countries (Germany?) any use of your wireless router is legally your responsibility and if you did not take steps to prevent use you can be done for it. This is not currently the case in the UK. But you better be able to prove it couldn't have been you.

Secondly using unsecured wireless without the owner's permission can be construed as theft and there have been people convicted of this.

"I have an unsecured wireless network.

I'm told that this is A Bad Thing. Apparently people might come and sit outside my home and do all sorts of naughty things - and the police won't believe me when I say it wasn't me."

Another of my favourites among the overhype crowd. I guess it could be a problem if you've set up file and folder sharing within your PC; but I doubt you have; and perhaps only if you have really important info stored in My Documents ...

BTW what's your address?

Oh, I wouldn't share my folders on it. But I can see little wrong with leaving the router open. I mean...if anyone wanted to do anything naughty, they could just as easily do it in Macdonalds.

On a related theme...do you know what really gets my goat? Hotels that charge £10+ a night for Wifi. . Mind you - I suppose if they did free Wifi they wouldn't make any money selling porn.

In fact...why don't you all join the revolution? Go home and unsecure your routers!

I think again that there is a prob with not securing your wireless as it does leave you open to attack and compromise.

But it may well not happen. I think there is also an element of trying to stop people using unsecured wireless as a defence against various illegal downloading charges. When Davenport Lyons recently had a go at putting the scarers on people they thought had been downloading games and films illegally through various p2p systems they tried to suggest it was the owners responsibility to fully control their wireless (which,as I mentioned, it isn't in the UK) mainly because the best defence was 'I have wireless, I dunno how it works/how to secure it - must have been a hacker coming in through it and downloading all that naughty stuff'.

No one who offered such a defence has been taken to court. But then no one who challenged their scare letter ever heard from them again.

Personally I'm more worried that one of the local teenagers would find a way in and stuff up either the router or my computer whilst learning to hack/through incompetence. That's probably the biggest worry

Why are people so against Norton security products? They only cost about 30 euros, and your computer will be protected against all the latest threats as soon as they happen.

Nothing against them at all. My friend was just asking if she needed what ended up being some £100+ of extra stuff on top of her already over-expensive (for what she needs) laptop. I told her she could get by happily with free stuff. 'Mony a mickle mak's a muckle'.

Is the free stuff updated every day with protection against the latest threats?

Usually, though you might have to do it manually.

The thing I have against Norton et al is that they are pre-installed and a bugger to get rid of.

"Why are people so against Norton security products?"

Because you don't need them.
Because there's free stuff that does the job better.
Because you are paying for something that isn't actually that good.
Because once it is on your computer it can be a s*d to get rid of.
Because it hogs resources and impacts usability.

I don't use it anymore. I understand that support is a costly affair and that not all of its components are fully interoperable with themselves, let alone anything else you may have running on the system.

Oh, and geek snobbery - there's always that

Simply put it isn't good enough. It wouldn;t be my first choice if it was free so given you have to pay for it it is deffo not worth it. I reserve a dislike for any product which relies on the customers lack of knowledge to sell itself to them.

Having said all that, I hear that their Internet Security 2009 is a *lot* better and they have addressed many of these issues. We shall see. Certainly the reviews are much more positive.

Gnomon - yep, Commodo, Avast, Avg, ZoneAlarm etc all do updates over the internet.

One thing to watch out for with Avast is that as default it has a rather deep male voice announcing that 'Virus database has been updated' when it completes the auto update and if you weren;t expecting it and have the speakers on it can be a bit of a shock!

Sure, Norton may well be the bestest, safest. But how safe is safe enough. For the money. You can *always* spend a little bit more to get something a bit better. But all those little bits add up.

"Sure, Norton may well be the bestest, safest. But how safe is safe enough. For the money. You can *always* spend a little bit more to get something a bit better. But all those little bits add up."

Problem though is
a) it isn't the bestest/safest
b) you can spend 20 quid less and get much better.

One of my friends once mentioned the "my parents" factor ...

For sure, they can get cheaper and better solutions; but when they're older and not particularly computer literate who are they going to turn to? The premium rate number to India? Logging on to the proprietary company's website forums and posting a log?

Realistically sometimes it's better for them just to go to PC World, have all the unnecessary, expensive crap loaded on to it; that makes them feel safe, and doesn't leave them dependent on when you next have a free evening. When something does go wrong they can go back to the store, deal face-to-face with someone and get it sorted.

PS the "my parents" factor could realistically be applied with less than a passing interest in computers. Age is irrelevant. It was just the way the story evolved with one of my mates.

true enough. And I guess I'm as guilty of that as the next person in areas I don't fully understand and don;t want to get bogged down in the detail.

Yeah...I sould have considered the 'my parents' factor when my friend called. Just told her to buy whatever PC World threw at her and leave me alone.

You know...it occured to me...I don't even think she has an internet connection. I wonder how she thinks the thing is going to work? Still...that's a fairly safe anti-virus guarantee!

Virus scanners doing things in the background has caused me a great deal more maintenance trouble than the viruses themselves, and Norton seems to be one of the worst offenders there. I think they probably have a profit motive to keep adding unnecessary features to justify having people buy the latest version.

One of the free scanners should do you fine.