Tom McGee's Blog

ZDNet’s Adrian Kinglsley-Huges recommends ditching Windows for all online financial activities, specifically banking at shopping. His recommendation? Burn a Linux live CD (he suggests Ubuntu) and booting up from that when it’s time to do anything money-related.

It’s a worthwhile point; Microsoft has been plagued with malware, viruses, adware, spambots and who knows what else for over a decade now with no end in sight. And the beauty of booting your OS from a CD is that it’s totally immune — once your CD is burned, it’s burned and nothing can modify it.

I’ve been using my Mac for online banking forever. It’s an older machine, 2002 or so, and that’s almost all I use it for these days. I’ve had it up to here (holds hand somewhere around eyebrow) with what a pain Vista is; I have no idea what’s going on when my applications for no reason stop responding then suddenly coming back to life.

Most of the time when I do online shopping it’s around the holidays; maybe I’ll prep a CD and whatever shopping I do then, do it on Linux. LF has another strategy: she’s got a credit card that she only uses for online purchases. It’s got a low credit limit and is firewalled from all her other accounts.

All of which starts to sound like a plan.