ISP quality

[Farmer Mike]

Do different ISPs do better or worse jobs of filtering out adware, spyware and viruses?

When I used Windows, I didn't have that much trouble on Earthlink. My Dad, however, is on Compuserve, and it seems that about every 6 months his systems become unuseable because of garbage that get on them from the web.

I'm working on them now, and I may make his systems dual boot so he can try Linux.

[Roxoff]

Nope, your presumption is wrong. It isn't the ISP's job to filter anything. It's only Windows users that need their hand holding by their ISP (who provide a filtering service to keep their networks clean in the face of users who dont care about their own equipment).

My network access is properly unfiltered and untouched. I'm responsible for bouncing any spam that arrives on my mail feed, and I use Linux across the network wherever possible to keep the exposure to viruses and spyware to a minimum.

Linux gives me the tools to handle these issues properly, I dont need an ISP that tries to do it too.

[burntfuse]

That's right, ISPs aren't going to filter every single GET request that goes through their computers and look for blacklisted URLs or filter the actual contents of the packets (like doing a virus scan on them, for example). It would be 10x as much work for them, and your connection speed would drop by half.

[Farmer Mike]

Then I'd better migrate him to Linux sooner.