[AT] OT - Malware blocking program

[Ken Knierim]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Mike Meulenberg <msm10301 at juno.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> I would be interested in finding a program that blocks the install of
> unwanted software. My Mom and Dad are notorious for clicking on emails that
> they shouldn't, and then they call me when funny things start popping up on
> their computer. The latest was Personal AV, and was kind of a pain to get
> rid of. I live 2 hours away so everything is done over the phone with my Dad
> :-0. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
> Best regards,
> Mike
>


Hi Mike,
    As far as email, you might consider switching them to something like
Gmail. It can be used as a POP client to read email from other sources
(similar to Outlook, etc) and has a rather decent (and free) virus scan
capability. For browsing, I use Firefox and have a plugin called Adblock
Plus that clobbers most of those annoying popups and curtails the flash
stuff immensely. It keeps a lot of the annoying stuff out of my face anyway;
whether it will work for your situation depends somewhat upon human
behaviour. I also run Linux but that's not for everyone and I didn't set my
Dad up with it. He prefers to maintain his system himself and uses a
web-based email and Firefox since he's on dial up and he got hit with some
viruses that went right through his Norton (swine flu for computers, IMHO.
it's a real pig!) firewall.

At least Firefox, Gmail and the popup blocker are free.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
http://mail.google.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

Hope this helps.

Ken in AZ