internet cafes and viruses

I went to the corner internet cafe to have a map printed. The map was a .ppt and when I saved it to the USB disk the .ppt became a .swf. I didn't know this, and at the cafe they couldn't open it, so I went back home to save it as a graphic. I was in a rush, so I just took a screen shot of gmail, saved it as a .png and brought it back to the cafe.

When I saved the .png back to the USB flash drive I saw that there was an autorun.inf file in there. Clearly I'd been infected by a virus. I went ahead and worked with the USB drive though since I don't care about windows viruses. I *could* get infected through wine, I guess, but I don't have that configured to autorun anything from devices. I don't even know if it *can* be configured to autorun programs and installers from removable devices.

The map got printed and the party was great fun.

I don't care too much about viruses since I don't use windows and am probably fairly immune. The thing to take away from this though is that windows viruses are everywhere. even if the windows user is 100% up-to-date with his/her antivirus definitions and runs two or three anti-virus programs (thus slowing down the computer by a LOT, buy twice or thrice the computer you'll really need if you want to run windows and antivirus) and practices safe computing practices, virus infection is probably inevitable (if only because, at some point, you're going to receive a real work related document from someone who isn't as virus safe as you, and they got hit by a zero-day virus and passed it on to you on the same day).

It's probably possible to go a year or two without virus infection by practicing ultra-safe windows computing. But everyone will get infected at some point. Ultra-safe windows computing is a pain too (never open attachments from anyone, never use removable media, never run as root, never go online to the internet, or if you do, never run flash, activex, java, javascript, don't run IE) and regular users just won't do it. Only geeks can be really safe from viruses, and even they are likely to weaken windows security because it's just too inconvenient. Oh yeah, don't visit pr0n sites, don't download and install free programs, etc.

Windows. What. A. Pain.