Jack Campin -

The use you propose should be safe. My mildly smart-a** comment was directed at Richard, who does intend to browse. (And I'll concede it was a pretty lame comment.)

While there are differences in Mac vs Windows vulnerabilities, several patches have been issued (mostly surreptitiously) by Apple, and they're largely the same sort of things for which Windows gets patched. Firewall and AntiVirus protections are recommended by Apple even for "pure Mac" users.

Much of the safety for Macs is because there are relatively few of them to be attacked. As Mac share of the market increases, increases in attacks are to be expected - and to some extent have already been seen. The same is true for Firefox, where the base of users has increased significantly, and more frequent exploits are beginning to appear. (A "critical" Firefox update was published within the last couple of weeks, I believe.)

Mr Red got my point - there probably are relatively few Win98 machines stil in use, and they're too slow on the internet to be useful; so it's possible that the scammers have lost interest in them - - although I wouldn't bet a bank account on it.

Anyone really seriously interested in the market for cracking programs, bot networks, and stolen data can go to Symantec Report on the Underground Economy and download the .pdf (3.25 MB) Symantec White Paper (Released November 2008). I'd suggest saving it to read at leisure, since it's about 84 pages fairly well stuffed with information. It includes (in the full paper) examples, including prices advertised, for the kinds of programs and data being bought and sold.

John