24 hours with my new mac

Joined
Apr 4, 2007
Messages
39
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1
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8
Location
Leeds, w.Yorkshire, UK
Your Mac's Specs
soon to be: 20'' 2.16ghz 1gb ram 250 harddrive.
It's been about 28 hours actually but anyway.
i bought the Imac, 17inch 2ghz, 1gb ram and 160gb hard drive.
since getting it out of the box i have downloaded quite abit, transferred my jpegs and mp3's from my p.c (actually still doing it) and i have to say i love my mac it was very straight forward to setup, apart from a few bumps in the road, properly installing something, and setting up a router. there as not been anything else.

I am finding it hard to get past my pc paranoia though and have been reading up on the mac firewall, i didn't realise that the firewall is turned off as default so i turned it on, put in stealth and firewall logging a kept udp though. i was reading the mac firwall antivirus thread and it was useful but some of it was abit back and forth i understand that it is personal preference, but i'm still confused about the firewall.

so i was just looking for some more advice about the firewall, i have set it to on and have enabled firewall logging and enabled stealth mode.
i'm i safe enough, i don't bank online. but i do use paypal and don't want someone getting hold of that. so what else can i do.
 
Joined
Dec 8, 2006
Messages
205
Reaction score
8
Points
18
Location
UK
Your Mac's Specs
MacBook 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 80GB Hard Drive, 80GB Video iPod (Black)
Firstly, anti-virus protection is not necessary. If you are paranoid then you could download ClamXav which is free, but it has never ever found a virus on my MacBook.

To test your security online and make sure anyone can not intercept what you send online then go to https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 . I have the Mac OS X firewall turned on, plus my wireless router has a firewall and it says I pass the test in flying colours. I'm sure yours will be pretty similar. I bank, shop and use paypal online and I have never had a problem or had my details intercepted, paypal, online banks and online shops all use encryption anyway so if someone tried to intercept then the information would just be a garbled mess of no use at all.
 
Joined
Apr 27, 2007
Messages
2
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Location
Burlington, Ontario
Your Mac's Specs
24" iMac 2.16Ghz, 1G RAM, 250G HDD (internal), 250G HDD (External FW)
If you are at home and using a broadband router of some sort (D-Link, Linksys etc..) to connect to the internet you don't need to enable the firewall as the router is doint NAT and thus hiding your PC from the outside world. The only traffic allowed through these routers is always originating from your PC's and the block all traffic originating from the Interent by default.

I don't use a firewall on my Mac, nor did I use one when I was using a PC.

Now if you have a broadband connection and you connect you Mac directly into a DSL or Cable modem provided by your ISP, then I would turn on the FW.
 

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