Hacking - Its a piece of cake nowadays. With hacking becoming easier day by day, companies get opportunities to bring out new products - it brings them more business.
They probably encourage hacking at one end too.
One of such products is the Zone Alarm Firewall. Basically a Firewall is a virtuall barrier for anyone getting into your system. Kinda like a watch man - someone comes to your computers door - watchman asks for his id and if you have that person in your list, the watchman lets him go in. Then again, there are several levels of security. You might just want the person to stay at a certain level. You can set that in ZoneAlarm and you do not need to be experienced at all. It guides you through each and every step.
You DO NOT have to shut it down when you are using napster. It will pop up a dialogue asking you if you want Napster to access the internet, and thats where you give permission for napster to go thru the firewall. It does this for all software needing to access the internet.
It also saves a daily report log file, storing information on the number of people who tried to access your pc, tried to ping it and so on.
ZoneAlarm is a necessity for all the people using broadband connection and is the best FREE Security Software in market at the moment..
(Btw, my company Cyquester Technologies Inc. is releasing the Beta version of such software pretty soon. Let me know if you are interested in beta testing :)