Computer help?

Presumably they're going to try to sell you AOL for Broadband, or convince you not to cancel your AOL account, etc. I'm sure they'll be very happy to remind you - constantly - that you can still use all the AOL services you know and love over your new DSL connection.It used to be notoriously difficult to cancel AOL service. Maybe that's still true. The customer service people really go for the hard sell.

If you go to the wrong webpage, with the wrong settings for ActiveX and Javascript, IE will drop one of a hundred nasty rootkits right onto your machine. The risk is even greater on broadband if you're not behind some kind of NAT. The really nasty rootkits ping their information back to the hacker; he just drops in and takes control of your machine, raids your files, turns your machine into a spam-sending zombie. The next thing you know you're persona non grata on the internet and your ISP cuts you off before you get them in trouble with a spam blacklist.Look, the days when everybody knew that "Good Times" was a myth and you couldn't get a virus from an email are long over. The viruses will simply install themselves to your PC without you needing to do anything at all. Of course one of the first things it'll do is disable your virus protection software. If your computer is at all connected to the outside world, I'd say about 100% if you wait long enough. Bought an iPod lately? About 10,000 of them recently shipped infected by a common Windows virus. Every now and then a virus makes its way onto the gold master for one or another commercially avaliable software packages and infects another couple thousand people.Something on the order of 60% or more of PC's are infected with some kind of malware. The best defense these days is a healthy dose of paranoia. Seriously. Learn to be PC paranoid.

No.What's more likely is that the hacker is trolling IPs and port scanning each one, several times a day; you turn your firewall off for a half-hour, long enough to be detected by the port scanner. The hacker's software drops a couple of rootkits onto your machine, the work of seconds. As soon as your firewall is back up they hack your registry and open a few holes in the firewall so they can report back to the master server.At that point, firewall or no, NAT or no, it doesn't matter. The rootkit has given the hacker everything he needs to zombie your machine. Ah. So, you are a little paranoid. In other words, you operate your computer from the perspective that interactions on the internet may not necessarily be between trustworthy parties.