See a fair few posts on here about good applications to run for keeping your new shiny desktop or laptop in tip top health.
Thought I'd add a few ways to keep yourself safe when browsing the internet.
First off your choice of web browser.
In Windows it depends what I am doing but I do tend towards either Chrome or FireFox for most things.
However, my FF is locked down quite significantly and it's not the easiest to achieve but if you want to get into the guts of it sometime, check out CCK2 which helps you achieve it.
For Chrome, I have several plugins that I use to block things:
No-script suite;
Ghostery;
uBlock Origin.
In turn they block scripts (you'd be amazed what things run in the background) and although it works well it can be tedious having to add a site to a whitelist then refresh the page.
Ghostery blocks tracking cookies, basically;
uBlock Origin blocks advertising and cookies.
Between them they do a decent job most of the time of sifting out the crud. Compare the two browser windows below on theregister - left is Edge with no blocking and right is Chrome with it:
If you want to check your own browsers privacy, look here - https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Just to be on the even safer side if I am doing anything that might be potentially a bit risky to my computer, then I have a virtual machine to "sheepdip" it from. This is locked down to the point that only your basic web ports are opened on the firewall plus a very few others and it has antivirus and antimalware tools. It's cloned too, so once I am done with whatever site if there's any shadow of doubt, I will rebuild from the clone.
Of course when I am really paranoid I liveboot a Linux desktop and browse from there.
I'd be curious about anything different/extra you guys do.
Thought I'd add a few ways to keep yourself safe when browsing the internet.
First off your choice of web browser.
In Windows it depends what I am doing but I do tend towards either Chrome or FireFox for most things.
However, my FF is locked down quite significantly and it's not the easiest to achieve but if you want to get into the guts of it sometime, check out CCK2 which helps you achieve it.
For Chrome, I have several plugins that I use to block things:
No-script suite;
Ghostery;
uBlock Origin.
In turn they block scripts (you'd be amazed what things run in the background) and although it works well it can be tedious having to add a site to a whitelist then refresh the page.
Ghostery blocks tracking cookies, basically;
uBlock Origin blocks advertising and cookies.
Between them they do a decent job most of the time of sifting out the crud. Compare the two browser windows below on theregister - left is Edge with no blocking and right is Chrome with it:
If you want to check your own browsers privacy, look here - https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Just to be on the even safer side if I am doing anything that might be potentially a bit risky to my computer, then I have a virtual machine to "sheepdip" it from. This is locked down to the point that only your basic web ports are opened on the firewall plus a very few others and it has antivirus and antimalware tools. It's cloned too, so once I am done with whatever site if there's any shadow of doubt, I will rebuild from the clone.
Of course when I am really paranoid I liveboot a Linux desktop and browse from there.
I'd be curious about anything different/extra you guys do.
