I'm so sick of the popups to upgrade software and hacking attacks

[domineaux]

Is it just me?

Are you getting as sick and tired of the barrage of upgrades crammed to us on a daily basis.  I cannot help believe this is just a new way for people to get in to our computers, extract a tidbit of information today, another tidbit tomorrow, another tidbit the next day, etc.  Then before long they've acquire a very nice little file on what we have, preferences, etc.

I know that may sound paranoid.  Gathering information like that is ideal and never disturbs the status quo.  People are pure pragmatics they're not thinking about tomorrow. "People trust" and that may be more of a bad thing than good thing.

I think I've been asked no less than 20 times in the past two weeks to upgrade my Flash player.  When I went to the site and clicked on download it didn't download nothing. It installed the player presto.  It made me angry to think they said one thing and did another.

The funny part is... I see all the content on all the sites I go to, but if I select to see a news item I get a message to upgrade my Flash player. I know for a fact my Flash player is upgraded to the very latest version.  Maybe the news sites are getting paid by Adobe for upgrades, even if the upgrades aren't required.  

I finally got sick of the constant Adobe reader thingy.  I downloaded a software called Foxit Reader.  It reads pdfs as well as adobe, and it has a remarkedly small application size compared to the Adobe hog.  I love it the Adobe thingy doesn't popup and upgrade.

I recently added new security on my computer, and my my my at the number of times I get popups on the zonealarm software firewall.  Popups where someone or some bot or something is trying to get into uDP port, #$@@ or TCP port *&$# constantly.

Sometimes I get 30 popups an hour asking me to allow or deny. The popups don't bother me.  What bothers me is how vulnerable I was before, and all there are all kinds of clandestine operations going on constantly.

Here is a link to the free version of Zonealarm, which I use.

http://www.zonealarm.com/store/content/catalog/products/sku_list_za.jsp?dc=12bms&ctry=US&lang=en

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If you're interested to secure your computer better. Get a router, it will act as a very competent firewall for hardware.  Get a software firewall like Zone Alarm. The Windows XP firewall is lame.  I don't know about the Vista firewall, because I'm still on XP.

Get a good virus scan.  I use the AVG free edition @ grisoft.com.  It is constantly updated and I've experienced excellent results.  It has picked off some pretty nasty stuff and forewarned me.   I use three Spyware scanners, the AVG, the SpyBot, and Adaware.

That's a mouthful of stuff, but I don't see how you can spend anytime surfing the web or downloading your email safely otherwise.

[IchBin]

I've haven't used a firewall or anti-virus software for years. If people realized how well they could protect their computers just by educating themselves it wouldn't have to be this way. First thing you can do is stop using Internet Exploder. Connecting a browser to an OS was the worst thing Microsoft could ever have done. I use firefox with the noscript extension which stops a site from executing any kind of script like flash/java/javascript/ etc without permission. Also Adblock is a beauty. Running behind a router is a great thing. Thats the only reason I don't run a firewall. Most routers come with built in firewalls now though.
IMO I wouldn't recommend Zone alarm though. I've read far too many horror stories on security forums about the havok that Zone alarm has caused on some computers. Just my $.02.

[Cosmic]

good point ichbin : P