internet cafe computers

I was at SM Megamall today, at the Villman internet cafe which is located in the middle of the promenade among all the computer shops.

I wanted to post this (or a similar) article from there, but I didn't. No internet cafe computers can be trusted with my password (not even for throwaway accounts like my hotmail spamcatcher account), and certainly I wasn't going to type my blogger password there.

The computer was supposed to be locked down. After the internet cafe support guy enabled sol's terminal and mine, I saw that I could select from a few categories (I chose internet). And once a category was chosen it let me select internet explorer (strangely enough, windows explorer was an option, so I might have been able to run an internet game, or solitaire, or whatever).

I can't stand explorer though (although I haven't seen IE7, which is supposed to have tabbed browsing, that might make it usable instead of instantly execrated). And anyway, explorer was a bit weird because I couldn't right click on links (if I can't open a tab, I want to at least be able to open a link in a new window). Sure, I could have done Alt-F (something else to get to new window), but that's too much work. So I surfed on over to mozilla.org and found a link to download and install firefox. I was surprised that it installed. I was pleasantly surprised since at least I'd be able to use a competent browser instead of the crap that comes with XP, but I worried some more since clearly I could just as well have downloaded any trojan or virus or spyware I wanted and it would probably have installed.

Possibly that computer had antivirus, but I doubt that. Too much expense for a cafe computer. Or if it did, then it would have been pirated (actually, I assume everything on that box was pirated, but maybe it wasn't, if installed in an SM). Anyway, that is a seriously incompetent setup. Maybe they reinstall everything from a ghost (or similar) image every day, but anyone could still install keyloggers and such and at least harvest a bunch of people's passwords all day.

If Villman can't even get this right (and they're big enough to know how to do things right), who *does* get things right? Maybe Netopia?