Thomas Greene is to Microsoft what Bowling for Columbine's Michael Moore is to the Bush family: their worst nightmare. Greene does not merely criticise Microsoft for not handling security issues well, he hammers the idea home again and again.
He explains why he thinks Internet Explorer should be wiped off your hard disk and replaced with the open source Mozilla. He details why he feels Linux is superior to Windows, and Microsoft's 'dirty tricks' to stop people from switching to Linux.
At some point we get it, and wish he would move on. We all know Microsoft has problems with security, mainly because it tries too hard to make things easy, but also because it was not important to them until just over a year ago. Greene covers just about all the issues, but it sounds almost personal.
In the first sentence, he says his book is for 'ordinary people concerned about computer security and online privacy'. This is questionable. He gets rather deeply into tech issues and vocabulary early on, and a true beginner may put the book down.
But he does cover just about everything you may want to know. One of the most valuable sections concerns processes Microsoft automatically has running that you can kill. He explains why each one is running, why it is dangerous, and offers some applications to resolve matters.
An excellent appendix lists all the ports on a PC and what they do, and even lists those used by the more famous worms and viruses.
There is little doubt this book will be of tremendous value to those who have a great interest in the subject. It may be a difficult book for the average computer users who want to know a bit about how to protect themselves. Then again, it is not an easy subject.