Elf Sternberg

Microsoft has released Own Your Space-- Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online, a 230-page book "for teens" teaching them how to be safe and secure in their use of on-line materials.

There's a very large section on malware, on how to protect yourself from viruses, trojans, and so forth and so on. What's fascinating about the book is the extent to which Microsoft's writers have eschewed any responsibility for making the host so damn infectious in the first place.

There is no mention of the MacOS or Linux OS at all throughout the book, no mention of their relative invulnerability and from-the-kernel-up security models, no mention of their own incomparably promiscuous and vulnerable operating systems and how those contributed to the general sense of Internet-borne threats to man and machine alike.

Buy a Mac. Run Thunderbird. Install Askimet. And you can skip chapters 1-5 entirely.

Chapters 6-16 are pretty good, though, but they're about the social dangers: cyberbullying, stalking, being too public with some things. On the other hand, chapter 12 is absolutely aghast that you might adopt anything other than a commercial licensing option for your own creative efforts.