Securing my laptop

In my car, I spend quite some time listening to podcasts. On the topic of security, the podcasts Security Now and the Dutch podcast "De beveiligingsupdate" are my favourites.

Driven by the suggestions in these podcasts, I have taken a few extra measures to secure my laptop:

1. Replace the ever leaky Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader with the Foxit reader.
2. Set the Security level in Microsoft Internet Explorer to High for every zone. Even when using another browser, IE is used in MS-Office applications.
3. Installed the NoScript plug-in in Firefox. NoScript allows to selectively allow the execution of Javascript. Only for a few sites I have allowed Java script permanently. For most sites, I only allow Javascript temporarily. It offers some extra defense against cross-site scripting attacks (XSS).

Disabling Javascript also helps with privacy: it reduces the amount of information exposed for browser fingerprinting. More Firefox add-ons for safer surfing are available here. Next one I'll try is Better Privacy to automatically remove Flash cookies.