Excerpts of “Microsoft’s festive advice: Don’t plug our PCs into the Web” by Charles Arthur, Technology Editor of the Independent News:
Its slogan is “where do you want to go today?” But Microsoft asks that if you get a Windows computer for Christmas,don’t take it to one particular place: the internet.
. . .
Microsoft’s advice features in a new page on – inevitably – its website, entitled “Protect New PCs Before Connecting to the Internet”.
Anyone who manages to go online to read it without being infected will find the company warning users to obtain anti-virus software, and turn on a protection system called a “firewall” (which new versions of Windows include, yet the company leaves turned off) before they venture online.
But as Simon Moores, an internet consultant, pointed out yesterday, the software giant’s admonitions “place the world in a catch-22: you can’t be sure that it’s safe to go online unless you connect to the internet and get a huge file of security updates from Microsoft, and new anti-virus files – which are also only available online”.