Celebrity advice on keeping your Linux desktop secure

masinick

This article covers the whole gamut from loose security to completely anal security. I guess it all depends on your view of how valuable your data is and what you stand to lose if it is either stolen or your system compromised. Would it make any difference if people took your information? Would it make any difference if the entire system was lost or destroyed? Answering those questions will do a lot to help you determine just how secure to make things.

I tend to be closest to Andrew Morton, except that I use internal firewalls rather than external firewalls or routers. I do not turn stuff off, I tend to turn a few more things on. However, I do not open stupid Emails, I only infrequently use office products that could harbor bugs, and there is not all that much information that would really kill me, even if I lost nearly all of it - mostly just time, contacts, and useful information. Yeah, it's nice, but not that much to lose. There may be a few passwords and accesses to accounts that I would rather that people not see, but then again, I take reasonable precautions which such things. Have not run into any problems with just modest security.

Torvalds has a lot more to lose and a lot of people's interests to protect, so I understand his anal nature. We used a pretty strong firewall at Digital back when I worked on UNIX, and we use really strong protection - perhaps stronger than Digital's - in my current job with Fidelity Investments. So where I need stronger safeguards, I definitely have them in place.

http://www.linux.com/feature/124994

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Brian Masinick
Distros: SimplyMEPIS
sidux - no CAPS!, antiX, Debian

melloe · Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2025 10:47 pm Post subject:

jada · Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2025 12:14 am Post subject:

I point this out several times before. I can recommend some nice tools for Linux Firefox,
http://www.siteadvisor.com/ free tool from Mc Afee

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865 Adblock Plus and here you get the subscriptions
http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions
EasyElement+EasyList, ABP Tracking Filter+Cédrics Liste, Malware Domains, Myspace Junk Filters, I am using it also working with Konqueror Wink

The Malware Domains I am blocking with the Black Liste in my Router. I tested it on Websites for Cracks, Serials and Adults how are full with bad contents.
With out the Black liste and using Windows all few second my virus scanner pop up, DANGER Block Delete etc!
With the Blacklist you can't open this websites at all. This means you can click on a link in a email, and you always got "blocked contents"!

But you need to maintain those things and we all know, people are lazy Laughing

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openSUSE 11.1 Desktop KDE 4.3.1 buildservice Factory
Linux Mint 7 Desktop Gnome

melloe · Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2025 3:11 am Post subject:

I did repair and sales for several years, and mostly MS of course. ~ sigh

Some of the boxes came with the same virus software that came with the OEM, but never updated, and never replaced. The clean up was going to be a mess, and almost without exception, no disk. Hundreds of spybots, virus, trojans, and on and on.

Lazy is not the word for it. <G><

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mell0: 1. Kubuntu, XP, Sabayon 2. Mandriva,Mint, Mephis
Thor: 1. VISTA, Fedora 2. Chakra, Debian
Sam:XP, SuSE Zues: win7, SuSE testing

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