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1) How do I turn off the PIII self ID feature?
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As others have said, you turn this off in the BIOS.
2) What is Zone alarm?
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Zone Alarm is what is known as a personal firewall, but it's really nothing more than a software component that sits in the IP stack of your computer and does port filtering. Depending on the level of paranoia that you set, it will block and alert you to certain types of traffic. On a cablemodem, be prepared for this thing to go off non-stop, as most cable services are just bridged as one big ethernet segment, and you see everyone elses traffic. You'll see lots of netbios name and data queries, as well as lots of malicious activity like people scanning for netbus and back orifice (remote control tools) or some of the Microsoft IIS related 'worms' like code red.
Zone alarm is one of the better personal firewalls, while black ice is the worst in my opinion. To lend some credibility to that opinion, one of my previous responsibilities was running a Cyberguard 2.0 firewall for a DOD contractor. Those are extremely hardened boxes. We also did our own testing at the last Fortune 500 company I was at, and Black Ice was the bottom of the barrel. It works, but little things just make it a less than effective tool. Things like the most paranoid settings making it complain about all sorts of things (UDP floods for traceroutes and streaming media services), and it's lack of reporting information. However, things may have changed since then, since I haven't looked at it since mid-2000.
3) What are the advantages of using a separate e-mail account, like hotmail?
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Hotmail and other mail services provide you with a conveneient way to get your mail at any place that has a web browser. For the most part, it's ok, but there are security flaws in it. The HTTP protocol was designed more for robustness and flexibility, not security. There have been more than a few problems with hotmail that have allowed people to access other people's e-mail, as well as other bugs.
4) What else should I be looking for, doing, etc?
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If you're going to run a Win32 operating system, I highly suggest making sure you stay current with all patches and hotfixes for it. That's the biggest thing in keeping any system secure, as most people out there are using known and patchable exploits. If more people took the time to keep their OS up to date you'd see less compromises.
Oh, and if you want to store any data on your PC that's questionable, I highly suggest using an encrypted filesystem of some sort. With stuff you can buy at Best Buy people can recover data that has been formatted and written over multiple times. And if you like tin foil [:)], there are ways of taking magnetic images of the hard drive platters and extracting data from them that has been overwritten dozens of times. An encrypted filesystem means that without the key, all they get is the encrypted bits, and not the information.
God Bless Texas