I found your discussion here by doing a search looking for a possible
> explanation for the decrease in spam I've received over the last
> several days -- about 90%. I was receiving approx. 100-150 per day, now
> about 10-15. Cool!
It appears that Cox is do> >> Well said! The spam-filtering and antivirus industries have often
> struck me as enemies disguised as friends. They rely on spam and
>> viruses to continue, so they can continue selling us their
>> technological solutions to human problems.
> And as near as I can tell, the only difference between anti-virus
> software and an actual virus is that you pay money to deliberately
> infect your system with anti-virus software which will render it
> sluggish and useless just like the viruses it claims to protect you
> from. (Or with the recent Norton debacle in China, will completely
> break your computer).
> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yeah, but the way you can almost always
> guarantee a virus-free computer is by putting up with that
> sluggishness while the virus checker thing literally examines the
> entire page you are atempting to download. Damned if you do, and
> damned if you don't, it would seem. PAT]
I run AVG for anti-virus, POPFile for spam filtering, and use a hardware firewall backed up by Windows Firewall. Hasn't really slowed me down any.