[dAnceguy117]

^ wow good call. yeah that's some bullshit really. pretty sure Microsoft doesn't tell its "legacy" customers (aka people who keep things until they stop working) that safely running XP while connected to the internet is basically impossible.

Originally Posted by Calcium Deposit

That's a level of paranoia that doesn't belong to consumer-level computing

At the enterprise level, yes you have to be super cautious because odds are you're worth hacking into to someone. But if youre just some dinky nerd on a computer trying to chat people up on neopets you've got the protection of anonymity and not being worth a damn

Tl;dr Odds are pretty good as long as you're not retarded or running a public server you're not going to run into any attacks/malware

If you did get a virus or whatever it's always 100% your fault

lol neopets.

gotta say though, I disagree. obviously people are in it for the money. would you rather spend time working on a way to break through corporate network security, or just infect and steal credit card info from a ton of machines operated by incompetent home users? not saying the latter is always more lucrative, but I think it's foolish to assume no one has any interest in going that route.

anyway I have my own reasons for being interested in the topic. IT major, yada yada.