So my P53 ThinkPad suddenly showed up 3 days early, and FedEx even delivered it to my house instead of my neighbor's one street away, which is a nice bonus.
But before I get myself online and wander around unprotected, I figured I should ask what people are doing these days (This Decade??) to "protect from online threats". I would imagine things have changed quite a bit since the aughts...
Windows has had a very good built-in antivirus since around Win7, no need to add anything else.
GameboyRMH said:Windows has had a very good built-in antivirus since around Win7, no need to add anything else.
Agreed for OS Antivirus.
On the browser side, I'm a big fan of Firefox and the Ublock Origin add-on as a minimum (I use it on my phone as my browser too!). I can't stand to browse the net without an integrated ad & tracking blocker like that. There's some other nice add-ons as well, but they start to border on annoying for a non-privacy-geek to put up with so I hesitate to recommend them out of the box.
If you want to get really geeky, set up a Pi Hole and route all local traffic through that the requests for ads and tracking never leave your house.
It really makes me twitch to say this, but, yeah... The built-in security features in Windows are actually pretty damned good. The only extra thing that you should consider is some sort of backup. You can use onedrive or google drive, but external drives have gotten pretty cheap and have the advantage of not needing an internet connection to be able to use them.
Another vote for uBlock Origin and firefox. They've done some things to Chrome that make things like uBlock not work right - and, in fact, I thought I heard that it may not be available for Chrome anymore. I also use the Privacy Badger plugin for firefox and make use of the container tabs. Sometimes that breaks poorly-designed stuff, but I leave Chrome in its "stock" form for those sorts of things. For Facebook, I use an Ubuntu VM running in Oracle's VirtualBox. Absolutely nothing else runs on that VM and that instance of Firefox isn't logged in and synched up with anything and does absolutely nothing but facebook. Gotta keep that poison on its own island.
Agree with everyone - you don't need anything but the built-in Windows AV. The aftermarket ones are mostly noisier to remind you of their existence so you keep paying the ransom, sorry, subscription.
Firefox or Librewolf for the browser, with the aforementioned plugins. Some websites work basically only in Chrome (because that's become the IE6 of the new era) and for that I keep Brave and/or Vivaldi around.
If you absolutely, postively must use Google Chrome, there is a version of uBlock Origin that works with the latest Chrome but IME you usually don't need Chrome if you can use Brave or Vivaldi.
You'll need to log in to post.
