[TheForge] a painless transition. [OT]

[Toni Janz]

* Jerry Frost (frosty at customcpu.com) wrote:
> This is a rare occurance if not unique for us. Deb and I just went DSL, I
> plugged the stuff in and it just works. Pfffft!
> 
> All I had to do was change a couple passwords, etc. and that's it. I just
> hit NASA and downloaded a couple meg in a few seconds instead of "NOT before
> my connection drops off" like yesterday.
> 
> Cool.
> 
> Gone surfin,
> 
> Frosty
> ------------------------
> If it ain't forged
> it ain't real.
> Wrought iron is.
> The FrostWorks
> 
> Meadow Lakes, AK.
> 
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Couple of thigs may be of concern if you have not taken care of it
allready:  

1. if you are using windows as your operating system you need to be sure
that you are as up to date as possible with regard to patching the
operating system.

2. #1 needs to be supplimented with some sport of firewalling/packet-filtering 
software if you are not using a seperate firewall, here is one I can recommend:

http://www.kerio.com/us/kpf_home.html

The thing is that once you are on a DSL network you become a target for
people who scan high speed networks for vulnerable operating systems
(sorry if you know all this allready as I just want to be sure in case
you did not) and Windows is notorious for having a whole slew of
vulnerabilities.  

Also if you can dump Internet Explorer and go for firefox not only is it
a bit more secure but it offers a whole lot of features IE does not have
such as Tabbed Browsing and Poppup Blocking:

http://www.mozilla.org

While you are at it you might look at Thunderbird as a mail reader
(available on that link too), as Outlook has another huge bunch of 
holes in it that allow for people to do all sorts of nasty stuff. 


Right so there ya go even though nobody asked ;-) 

Toni