Typhoid Mary

David Ramsey has written an article about his experiences with Windows viruses. He notes that his PC was reinfected with a virus within minutes of reinstalling Windows XP.

My favorite part is at the beginning:

I build my own PCs from scratch (we'll overlook for the purposes of this rant that these days that's only slightly more difficult than building with Legos)...

Indeed, I have encountered many clueless, virus-ridden computer users who claim "But I build my own computers!" The point is as simple as David Ramsey puts it:

If you are running Windows and are not running a firewall and a frequently-updated anti-virus program, then your computer is infected. It might be infected even if you are running this stuff. And you had better simply get used to little dialogs popping up saying things like "Program svchost.exe is trying to access the Internet. Allow?" and "The program is waiting for Norton Antivirus to scan the file" because that's simply the price of using the Typhoid Mary of operating systems today.

(Via Macintouch)