Maybe it's the uncertainty in the global financial markets, a wave of crazy weather, or a lousy fall TV season, but lately I've been seeing a near-constant flow of comments and stories about how -- and even if -- home computers need security.
The "lock it down" mentality made sense to me for years -- as someone with a fully paperless office, the idea of having something spew my data out to the world is pretty daunting.
But, earlier this year, my friend John from the
Yahoo paperless group suggested to me that I probably don't need much, if any, online security. His advice was to surf in Firefox with NoScript and AdAware on, crank up the spam filters on my email, and use virtualization -- software that lets you operate in a "virtual image" of your system without writing data or making changes to the underlying system
I haven't tried virtualization yet -- although I've been promising John that I will soon -- but I took his advice on the other stuff: I strengthened my router's firewall, moved to Firefox, and got tough on spam. Four months later, scans say I haven't had a spyware issue or problem yet.
Sound crazy? The folks at
don't think so.
Check out the story from this month's issue about how much security is really enough.
Aside from the article I mentioned last month, today Wired notes that dropping a firewall and other virus/malware protection is a good way to speed up Internet access. 
may be on the way out: The Federal Trade Commission won a federal court order to shut down one of the largest U.S. spam rings. According to the New York Times, these particular spammers may account for one-third of all spam. 
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