----- Original Message ----- From: "Luis Moreira" Subject: [OT]: Stupid Virus on my PC!!!! Help > updates. today I just had a message popping up on the screen from Norton > saying that I had the spybot worm virus on my computer and it could not > remove it!!!! The Internet Storm Center estimates the time that an unprotected computer can survive uninfected on the Internet. Yesterday, that time was -up- to 19 minutes. You not only need to have AV software installed, you need to be fully up to date on patches and virus definitions, and you need to not do stupid things. > How the hell can it not remove it ? Go to the Symantec website for removal instructions, as someone else has pointed out. > Stupid crap of an operating system this Stupid Windows is!!!! I can sort of agree with you, but another OS isn't a silver bullet. There are almost as many Linux exploits as Windows, it's just that Linux doesn't have the installed base to get the worms distributed, and Linux users are less likely to do stupid things. A lot of folks have proposed Mozilla as a magic bullet but I'm not so sure. There aren't nearly as many exploits for Mozilla as for IE, but all the IE exploits I've seen require you to do something stupid -- the Mozilla exploits don't. Same with Outhouse Express. It's a perfectly safe mail client as long as you don't do something stupid. (I don't have the same regard for Outlook, however). Staying safe is the same no matter what the OS: - Keep your AV software up to date - Keep the system fully patched - Don't allow active scripting - Never open an email as html - Don't log on to an account with admin privs The last one may be the most important, and it is a lot more annoying to do on Windoze than on Linux. XP comes out of the box pretty badly configured and for quite a while you discover something that needs admin privs to fix every few minutes. You can't just su to fix it like Linux, so it's a royal pain. But eventually things settle down and running with an unprivileged account isn't so bad. --McD -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.