How to Avoid Friendly Infections

I love to “steal” content and blog post ideas from others (usually AuditMonkey), but this time, I slim-fingered from Mister Reiner (check out his computer security and hacking blog at misterreiner.wordpress.com).

All I really stole were the ideas inspired by a comment that I left on his post entitled, Your friends and relatives can go home and jack up their own computer. Reiner wrote that allowing others on your computer might result in an infected PC if your friends and relatives do stupid things like surf porn or open email attachments. To avoid these issues, he suggested you do the following:

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Teach Yourself Security

What does it take to get started in information security? Can you teach yourself security?

This field requires you to understand how PCs, mobile devices, applications, servers, protocols, and networks operate. It helps to have a lot of curiosity and a good sense of where trouble lurks. And don’t forget Unix/Linux (more on that later).

I started as a PC support guy, became a server administrator, managed a network, and then became a security analyst. For me, it was a natural progression, but that’s the “old school” way of doing it. Security training was scarce, and there were few to no institutions offering training specific to that area. Also, the internet was still growing, and there were few security websites or blogs to learn from.

Firefox May Already be Dead

Keir Thomas, author of several books on Ubuntu, including the Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference, declares that Firefox has lost its way.  He says that the fox is slow and Slashdot users are complaining about it heavily.