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The best browser that has no way to get spyware/malware

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stanginit said:
My daughter is in College. She called me one Friday frantic. Her machine had gotten a virus even with the Universities supplied McAfee. I told her to contact the computer department on campus. She told me that the tech support crew is off on the weekends. She had a paper due on Monday. She then tried contacting her computer friends but being Friday night, they were off campus partying. I drove up there the next day with Fedora Linux loaded on a laptop. I was able to slave her hard drive and get the documents she needed off of it. I left her the Linux laptop . She now does all her research on the net via the Linux laptop. I was able to Clean the windows laptop and mailed the drive back to her. I installed windows and Linux in dual boot mode. She now uses primarily Linux to surf and write her documents in Open office. She can switch to Windows when needed. Moral of this story is to use different tools to get certain things done. At home, i run Windows, Linux and Mac. I do not let my wife surf the net with the Windows PC as she keeps our budget and receipts on the windows machine. Just a thought.

This is not a what OS is best. Just my solution to make my computing life easier.
Regards
Rich.
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I am sure you love your daughter and glad you have a great family!

I wish I could setup a linux box for the Internet browsing only, guess what, I am not familiar with any linux at all. Mac and Windows are way easier for me. I know it's not that hard when it comes to Linux. My point is, if Firefox works perfectly under Linux with all the javascript enabled, why it cant achieve the same reliablity in Windows environment. I am an old school guy, I know I dont want to switch to Linux :(
 
joey_B said:
Aren't you guys working yourself up a little about nothing?
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I've been in the computer industry a long time and I'm very comfortable with the technology. It's no big deal for me to set up a virtual machine to run my financial transactions in, and it gives me peace of mind. Better safe than sorry...
 
sikaissan said:
I am sure you love your daughter and glad you have a great family!

I wish I could setup a linux box for the Internet browsing only, guess what, I am not familiar with any linux at all. Mac and Windows are way easier for me. I know it's not that hard when it comes to Linux. My point is, if Firefox works perfectly under Linux with all the javascript enabled, why it cant achieve the same reliablity in Windows environment. I am an old school guy, I know I dont want to switch to Linux :(
Click to expand...
You don't have to switch cold turkey. Just give it a test drive. ;)

If you know what torrent files are download it from here:

http://torrent.ibiblio.org/torrents/86e1d10618ae4f2741e5ffc4acbdc8fcd4b41cab

If not, just download it from here:

http://pclosusers.com/isos/pclinuxos-kde-2011.6.iso

That is a "CD Image" file of about 700 MB. Once it is downloaded find out how to burn CD Images with the program you use to burn CDs. You don't want to just burn the file into a CD as a regular data CD. For example, with "Nero Smart Essentials" you have to first click on the "Rip and Burn" category. Then you have to click on "Burn Data Disk". That gives you four options to choose from: Data, Music, Videos/Pictures, and "Image, Project, Copy". The last one is the one you want. It will then allow you to select the image file you downloaded and it will burn, not just a CD, but a "Live CD". A Live CD is a CD that you can boot from and actually run your computer from it.

Usually all you have to do is put it in the CD tray and boot your machine. If it doesn't start you probably have to make a change in the Bios to place the CD before the hard drive in the boot order. This means that your computer will first check to see if there is a bootable CD in the CD tray before booting. If there isn't it will just proceed to boot from the hard drive.

I think you will be amazed to see how well this works. You will now have a way to browse the internet with no danger of being infected whatsoever.
 
Sean Nelson said:
joey_B said:
Aren't you guys working yourself up a little about nothing?
Click to expand...
I've been in the computer industry a long time and I'm very comfortable with the technology. It's no big deal for me to set up a virtual machine to run my financial transactions in, and it gives me peace of mind. Better safe than sorry...
Click to expand...
Well, then you probably know that financial data is mostly harvested using spoofing sites, live taps into outgoing network streams and hoax-mailing. In that case it doesn't matter how sandboxed you are, because the data is not taken directly from your machine. The victim is essentially giving the info away...

Virtualizing can come in handy, if you want to avoid your PC being hijacked and being part of a mass-attack. But for most people who are not so at ease with pc's, I think the illness does not justify the cure.
 
Well, why don't we skip the OS completely, saves time, and malware doesn't have a place to install itself.

http://www.google.com/chromebook/

Still, all of those measures won't protect you from human error and attack methods that don't need to gain access to your PC. There is no failsafe way to browse the web.
 
joey_B said:
joey_B said:
joey_B said:
Aren't you guys working yourself up a little about nothing?
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Click to expand...
Click to expand...
joey_B said:
Sean Nelson said:
I've been in the computer industry a long time and I'm very comfortable with the technology. It's no big deal for me to set up a virtual machine to run my financial transactions in, and it gives me peace of mind. Better safe than sorry...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
joey_B said:
Well, then you probably know that financial data is mostly harvested using spoofing sites, live taps into outgoing network streams and hoax-mailing. In that case it doesn't matter how sandboxed you are, because the data is not taken directly from your machine. The victim is essentially giving the info away...
Click to expand...
Actually I'm more worried about what I don't know about than what I do know about. It seems very likely to me that there's more malicious stuff out there than the "good guys" know about. I don't know "what percentage of the iceberg is above the water", but I'm pretty sure that some of it is submerged and is therefore doubly dangerous.

I'm already satisfied that I'm protected against the risks I know about. It's the other stuff - those "unknown unknowns" - that are of the greatest concern to me.
 
Sean Nelson said:
One of the things I really like about NoScript is that it permits/denies functionality on a site-by-site basis. So for a single web page that shows content from multiple sites you can allow "risky" functionality for content that's coming from the main site without allowing it for all of the junk coming from other sites. That's often where the greater risk is - not in the actual page you want to view but in the referred pages being hosted and authored by people who have nothing to do with the content you're viewing.
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I used Firefox + NoScript during my "adventurous browsing days." My default was to have all sites blacklisted, moving individual sites to the whitelist as needed. I had no antivirus installed but managed to stay free from malware (and from those ads!) for more than two years! And the only reason I got infected was because I ran a software I knew most probably contained malicious code.

--
Mark

Wild Birds of the Philippines
http://markrgli.smugmug.com
 
Best sandbox is a dedicated PC used for browsing and not on your home network but completely isolated. A Mac Mini would be perfect for this. Also good for email to isolate your other computer and home network users.

No free lunch, if you want to allow website scripts to run rampant then they are going to trash your computer and all you can do is limit the damage to one single computer.
 
That's some hosts file :) I might just give it a try to see if it dose all it claims. Seems the speed improvement alone would be worth using it. Seems most pages load slowly because they are waiting for the freaking ad servers. Thanks for sharing that.
--
Doug
 
Doug R said:
That's some hosts file :) I might just give it a try to see if it dose all it claims. Seems the speed improvement alone would be worth using it. Seems most pages load slowly because they are waiting for the freaking ad servers. Thanks for sharing that.
--
Doug
Click to expand...
I've been using MVPS Host File for several years and it does work great, very easy to install, too.

Stan
 
A little off topic, but these days I only open messages after sending them to spam, first. And I'm very careful about attachments.

Microsoft has a new Standalone scanner which you download onto a disc then boot with that. Fantastic, but takes 3 hours! Catches and removes virtually everything including rootkits and Conifers. Comes in 2 flavors; 32 bit and 64 bit.
 
Don't like Symantec or Norton AV. I stopped using that years ago - it seemed like it wanted to take over my computer. I now have Malwarebytes, Avast, MSE, and Comodo FIrewall. All free and working happily together. I just recently gave a donation to Faststone after using their free software for years. Glad I stopped paying for Norton many years ago.
 
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