[Voodoo Thumb]

I checked my email quickly in a local internet cafe. I was careful to log out, but now I'm wondering if I should change my password. How safe a practise is this?

[blues_harp28]

Hi once the Browser shuts down and you log off the machine, all is closed.
If you are concerned change the password.
It is a good idea to change the password anyway - I change mine once a month.

I also if using an internet cafe, take a USB stick with my own browser on it and then I'm not using their IE browser - paranoid?? I may be.

[rainforest123]

If you use a flash drive at a different computer, consider disabling Windows' autorun feature. There are viruses known to infect flash drives and spread the infection through the use of autorun & the flash drive.

RF123

[Elvandil]

A good USB firewall is a very good idea when you can use it.

[rainforest123]

E:
Interesting.

Please excuse my feeble mind. Does the USB FW attempt to protect the USB drive from becoming infected, or prevent the home computer from becoming infected after a USB drive, used, in this example at an internet cafe, is connected to one's home [ or business ] [ or any other ] PC?

RF123

[Elvandil]

I guess it would make sense to go both ways. But it is the autostart "feature" that is the danger since anything can be made to autostart so that is a great way for a virus to execute itself. Luckily, most burning software disables autostart. It has certainly been a long time since this sort of thing was a problem, but there was a time when floppies spread far more viruses than the internet. Now virus writers are getting better. A virus can be deposited silently on a USB drive and wait until a new SID appears for execution and spread.

[rainforest123]

E:
Thanks.

Does one install the USB FW on the flash drive or the home PC [ vs remote PC, such as an internet cafe ], or both? Does USB FW run automatically, if on the FD? That is, does it autorun? Does the user need to run it after inserting the FD? That would make no sense because the user would have to run the risk of some malware infection running before the user could run USB FW.

I suppose you remember making a floppy disk "read only" to prevent the floppy disk from becoming infected. How could we enable such a feature on flash drives?

RF123

[macro_scoop!]

of course changing password every now and on is a good practice u should get used to ,, also ,,, using USB at any PC may be kinda dangerous , just coz of some annoying viruses like the silly autorun virus ...
also ,,, dealing with IE is a bad idea these days ,,, many IE vulnerabilities may cause ur data to be "Not That Secured" ...
at any net cafe ,just download quickly Fire Fox , gonna be kinda helper..

[rainforest123]

Unfortunately, FF also has vulnerabilities.

RF123

[Elvandil]

Yes, FF had more last year than IE did. Nothing's perfect. And FF has gotten slow and clunky. But Mozilla is still hanging in there with SeaMonkey. With pipelining enabled (which supposedly many sites don't support, though I see none that are not accelerated in use) and link pre-fetching, and it is by far the fastest browser. Fetching the data ahead of time makes for a faster browser than even Chrome since the javascript can only be processed after it is loaded. So though Minefield and Chrome are fast with javascript, they don't seem to out-perform SeaMonkey.

Many flash drives come with a read-only switch so that can be used. There al also a number of programs available for password-protecting the conyents of USB drives.

As far as the firewalls go, there are a number of them found in a search, so they probably run the gamut of possible functions.

[rainforest123]

E:
Thanks.

Unsubscribed.

RF123