David W. Fenton wrote:
No one should connect their PC directly to the Internet. A full-scale firewall is not entirely required. A NAT router prevents any incoming connections from getting to your computer (unless you explicitly redirect the ports involved), and a software firewall on the PC will allow you to control outgoing connections in ways that dedicated firewall boxes never allow at all (i.e., you can authorize outgoing connections by application, which can never be known by an external device).
Unless there's some incentive for ISPs to provide expensive routers (instead of cheap USB ADSL modems), this won't happen. And most people don't understand that there's a big risk through poor security - the tiny minority who get stung by dialers or by phishing or whatever are enough to pay the wages of all the criminals involved. We 'happy many' just get stuck with endless spam that's eventually going to pick out those hapless individuals.
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