Windows XP and passwords

Well here's an interesting one I picked up from a live meeting last night hosted by Steve Lamb. Quite apart from having his email address on his blog and saying he doesn't get many coming through from there - yes Steve, that's because you are Steve on the blog and Stephen on email!!!

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the live meeting for Get Safe Online, the initiative to get rid of spam, spyware, bots and so on (http://www.getsafeonline.org/). Steve just happened to slip into conversation the fact that Windows XP accounts with no passwords cannot be used / accessed remotely. Not only is that a useful thing to know from a backwards security point of view (no security / no password = greater security), but taking it further, during account creation, why not have an option to say "I'll never want to access my computer remotely using this account"? Have that as the default and you have to change the setting to allow remote access using that account.

I know quite a few end users whose computers at home are in a terrible state due to spyware, trojans, bots, spam and so on. A good number of them frequent less than salacious websites and a large chunk of them use file sharing applications. They would all benefit from knowing about the Get Safe Online scheme but mainly, they would all benefit from a really useful Windows utility that gets rid of spyware. It's called fdisk.