Greetings --
That advice is very, very dangerous.
You should be especially wary of people who advise you to do
nothing more than disable the messenger service. Disabling the
messenger service is a "head in the sand" approach to computer
security.
The real problem is _not_ the messenger service pop-ups; they're
actually providing a useful service by acting as a security alert. The
true problem is the unsecured computer, and you've been
advised to merely turn off the warnings. How is this helpful?
Equivalent Scenario 1: Somewhere in a house, a small fire starts,
and sets off the smoke alarm. You, not immediately seeing any
fire/smoke, complain about the noise of the smoke detector, and are
advised to remove the smoke detector's battery and go back to sleep.
Equivalent Scenario 2: You over-exert your shoulder at work or
play, causing bursitis. After weeks of annoying and sometimes
excruciating pain whenever you try to reach over your head, you go to
a doctor and say, while demonstrating the motion, "Doc, it hurts when
I do this." The doctor, being as helpful as some of your respondents,
replies, "Well, don't do that."
I'm beginning to think that the people deliberately posting such
bad advice are hacker-wannabes who have no true interest in helping
you secure your system, but would rather give you a false sense of
security while ensuring that your computer is still open to
exploitation. The only true way to secure the PC is to *properly*
configure the firewall; just installing one and letting it's default
settings handle things is no good. Unfortunately, this does require
one to learn a little bit more about using a computer than used to be
necessary.
Bruce Chambers
--
Help us help you:
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. -- RAH
