Or how do I know if I already have it?
thanks,
pj

Please take this FWIW>

This no doubt may constitute an irational decision of "what, are you crazy?" proportion, but in an effort to lend some credence to what I'm about to say, I've decided to put such irrational decision in play here.

Computer security is a chase, not unlike other chases, such as the current state of affairs affecting people's desire to live in peace while pursuing life, liberty and happiness; not unlike the chase, in the interest of national security, to keep us secured from foreign terrorists; not unlike the chase to secure us from the domestic terrorists purporting to be the ones in charge of things, like our everyday lives, or the job of protecting us from foreign terrorists; not unlike the chase of good health at the expense of taking the pills and other establishment-patented treatments. A lot of corporations, starting with the Microsofts and the Symantecs of the world, have expereinced a decent bump to their bottom lines as a result of we the people chasing the ever elusive secure computing environment.

I have not downloaded and installed a single microsoft "security patch" for 15 months and running now, to include no patches/fixes/updates for the main MS OS, and no such for MS components like Browswer, email, Word or other appls. The irrational part of this exercise is that stating such in a public forum may be akin to publicly announcing "please come and hack my computer". It is worth mentioning that during these same 15 months, with only one exception, I have not had any problems with crashes in general, no browswer crashes, no OS crashes, no appl crashes..... so it's fair to ask "what have I been missing out on in my decision to stop downloading patches, fixes and the whole nine yards of "updated computer security methods" ?

Be this as it may, the one exception occured less than 2 weeks ago. There was an incident that occured on my computer. The obvious inmpact of this incident that I've been able to discover so far is that it nuked/hacked/disabled only my then installed Norton 2003 Anti-virus and Internet Firewall packages. I did not lose any data that I'm aware of, I did not suffer any viruses, worms or hacks that left me with an unfunctioning computer or a hanging OS..... but it's always hard to be sure about these things, there may be such things still lurking and waiting to make themselves known to me and my computer. It would be easy to speculate what the cause of the incident was. It would be especially easy to speculate and say "a HA!, you got hacked and you deserved to get hacked because of the decision to stop downloading and installing security patches!". I'm still piecing together the clues of what happened, still scratching my head over the ordeal, but I can say this. This incident lead me to buy a new and expensive Norton package. In retrospect, I'm inclined to believe that people like the Symantecs and Microsofts, as well as the higher ups that dictate, control and manipulate the Symanctecs and Microsfots of the world, are pretty secure, after a fashion, if nothing else, they are secure in terms of profit/income. I'm also inclined to ask how secure am I? Pretending for a moment I am someone who's constantly chasing the latest security fix/patch/update, how secure am I?

Hey, let's be careful out there! :)