Re: anti-malware progs ineffective

From: Kitchen Man (nannerbac_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 01/29/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:09:18 -0700

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:19:10 -0700, learner@juno.com wrote:

>
>If you want to get rid of nearly all spy/adware, and even virus issues,
>quit using Outlook and Internet Explorer.
>
>Mozilla is a very well done browser, that can be configured to block
>popup ads, and restricts access to the system. Internet Explorer almost
>seems to "go out and get" spyware, as it is so vulnerable, and has such
>little security. Besides, if you don't know what 'tabbed browsing' is,
>consider checking out Mozilla. It is the best feature ever created for a
>browser.

I have Firefox configured to prompt me before accepting any certificate.
I always accept known certificates only temporarily. This is never more
than a minor pain in the neck, the worst being the two certificates I
have to accept to get mail from - you guessed it - hotmail. Yahoo does
not attempt to install certificates. Online shopping gives me the
opportunity to decline many, many certificates.

OK, watch out, I didn't mean to, but a rant popped out anyway:

I work for the Fed, and unfortunately, the Fed has mandated IE as the
browser of choice, Outlook as the email client, and (my God, WHY?) MS
Word as the chosen word processor. At work, I use IE only for those
applications that require it, official stuff. The AFPC (Air Force
Personnel Center) has a bunch of monkey boys doing their web stuff, it
relies heavily on pop-up windows, can't be used with anything but IE,
and is *always* screwed up to some extent.

I do my documents in Adobe, and distribute memos and such in PDF. Screw
them if they don't like it. Some very important documents are required
to be in MS Word, and I have spent many hours getting the outline
numbering to work halfway reliably. I pushed to get Framemaker adopted,
but that means spending money, so no go. Framemaker has some quirks,
and doesn't have the bells and whistles of Word, but it is rock solid
reliable. There's an Australian gal, a MS employee, who has a really
good website devoted to getting around the stupidity of MS Word:
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/

Still, Word is a funny beast. I get the numbering to be clear and
consistent (and the user must be especially careful not to allow MS to
totally screw up the document), and yet when I print selected pages, the
numbering is lost completely. Paragraph headers come out 0.0, 0.0.0,
and so on. Numbering that is not part of the overall scheme comes out
really weird - one table numbered 1-14 prints out as 13 sixes and a
seven at the end. This is Office 2003, mind you, the latest version.

I have a hypothesis that the SW writers at MS deliberately screw up Word
so that other vendors, Adobe and Word Perfect for example, can't open
Word documents. What a bunch of crap. 

--
Al Brennan

Relevant Pages