Firefox does a good job of blocking the pop-ups on the railpictures website and I haven’t bothered to unblock any of the pop-ups. There are also some good add-ons such as Adblocker and NoScript that will further improve security.
The latest version of Internet Explorer has a pop-up blocker as well, but don’t have any experience with it.
A even more secure approach would be running Solaris on SPARC (or MacOS or Linux on PowerPC) as anything but Java malware would be incompatible with the processor.
One caution about Linux (or any other UNIX). Getting it set up properly does require a bit of knowledge of how the system works, although many flavors of Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) do have a very straightforward access to security settings. As you pointed out, the “Live CD’s” have the advantage of not touching the hard drive.
Add one to the list of ruined computer…$200.00 later still waiting for the reformat disc to arrive from the computer company so I can have the entire hard drive wiped clean and reformat it.
The blue screen virus arrived either from RailPictures, (my geek is pretty sure thats where it came from) or in a chain e-mail, all of which will now be deleted…from now on, if someone continuies to send me chain e-mail, I will simply block them from my machine.
Railpictures has twice infected my machine, once with a “pop up” virus and this time with the blue screen virus, as described in the opening post.
My computer geek told me the same thing, if you think it has happened to you, do not X out, eithr pull the plug, or the alt control delete routine.
If you get it, be prepared to lose all data on your machine.