Greetings --
Please stop posting potentially harmful advice. 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're only
advice, however well-intended, was to 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. The home-owner, not immediately seeing
any fire/smoke, complains about the noise of the smoke detector, so
you tell him to remove the smoke detector's battery and go back to
sleep, or whatever else he was doing.
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 you are, replies, "Well,
don't do that."
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.
I'm beginning to think that the people deliberately posting such
bad advice are hacker-wannabes who have no true interest in helping
anyone secure his/her system, but would rather give false sense of
security while ensuring that the computer is still open to
exploitation.
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
