I am a firm believer, especially after listening to many episodes of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast, that open-source security, as against closed proprietary security, is the way to go. I know that there are many who would contest this argument, citing that a naked source code would lead to more hacker exploits, but it is precisely this level of transparency that enables us to be assured that there are no backdoors in the code. I still believe that people are fundamentally good, or at least that there are more “good” people than “evil” people, and thus any vulnerability will be more likely fixed rather than exploited.
Having said that, my problem is that I can’t seem to find enough open-source security tools. There is ClamWin, an open-source anti-virus software, which I have recently migrated to. Then there is Truecrypt, which I recently installed and am now using to encrypt any data that I store in USB flash drives or in CDs. The reason why I use Truecrypt is because I tend to be very forgetful and I tend to misplace USB flash drives. Truecrypt is so elegantly designed that I forget that it is even working.
But I still can’t find any trustworthy open-source firewall or spyware blocker…