I use all the same things that fellow geeks tend to use...Adblock Plus, NoScript, host file, etc. They work great for me but for the average person (family, friends, customers, etc) I find that a few minutes of explaining the existence and nature of the 'dark side', combined with the addition of a few basic measures keeps most of the crap at bay with little effort on their part. From speaking to them on a regular basis (I've been driving around fixing home and business machines for over 5 years now (3-5 calls per day) with a small Boston-area company so I've seen a huge cross-section of users) I've pieced together what I think is the root of the matter..."Internet Security" programs...

These things (Norton and McAfee are the worst) claim to do everything but make people breakfast, not only on the package but also on their websites. Most machines even come with free trials of these bastards installed by default. They have cartoon interfaces with green lights and checkboxes and all manner of condescending 'you are safe' messages all over them. What they fail to mention is that they can only effectively protect against what is on their 'lists'. I understand they need to make money but its downright deceptive to give people the expectation that they don't have to do anything to keep themselves safe. Once the average person installs one of these monsters they assume (and yes its foolish to assume anything but to them the computer is a tool, not a second job) that nothing can harm them. After all they paid money for it to protect them. Most are horrified to find out that these things are smoke and mirrors and that even though their AV says 'you're protected' they still ended up infected with a rootkit or something similar that completely evaded detection because it had hit the ground running less than 24hrs previously.

The particular attack form that hits sites like the ones mentioned in the article is the worst, and actually relies on the AV vendors own obnoxiousness to trick people. Regular AV software loves to pop up and announce how great a job its doing. Most people ignore these and just click whatever they have to to dismiss them. Why? Not out of stupidity (usually) but because it happens so frequently that they've become desensitized to it. So when they are on a site and a popup announces they've been infected and that unfortunately they need to renew their subscription to fix the problem, they click what they need to in order to get back to what they were doing. They don't notice that words are slightly mis-spelled or that Antivirus 2010 doesn't say McAfee or whatever it is that they've got. They see a giant cartoon with warning messages and a 'fix it' button. It all happens so quickly that most of the time when I'm talking to a customer about it they don't remember actually doing it until an hour into the call.

Whats the solution? I don't think there is a perfect one, but I can say that I've had tremendous luck over the last several years with a very basic approach. Currently it consists of the following...

Education - a 15 minute conversation (in plain english btw) can save you hours of repairs later. once people have a realistic expectation of what their role is in their own safety they become better users
Getting them to use IE only for the sites they absolutely need it for (usually internal work-related ones)
Migrating them to Firefox w/Adblock Plus and Web of Trust (the ad filtering is a great way to get most people to dump IE in a heartbeat)
OpenDNS set up on their router with the updater service running on one of their machines (only if they want sites blocked for kids/employees/whatever)
Basic antivirus (AVG, MSE, etc) with as many of the more annoying features shut off as is possible so that when they see a message they might stop to read it.

With the above stuff in place the only malware-related things I need to get rid of are usually related to a toolbar that something like Java installed on them or if someones kid went off to pirate something and got infected (thus bypassing any security in place by looking for trouble actively).

YMMV of course...

I use the free Hamachi client along with UltraVNC (both running as services) on literally dozens of family members computers. I create different Hamachi networks based on what corner of the family I'm dealing with and can remote in anytime they need me to look at something. Saves a ton of effort. I used to use RDP and Crossloop but nothing has been easier for me than this combo. Sure it takes about 2d6+3 minutes to get set up initially but I let them know in advance that if I'm going to be working on their machine I'll need to have this stuff running. The only time its been an issue is when I don't have the machine in front of me to work on. In which case I will generally use the my companies LogMeIn account for a few minutes to set this stuff up and be on my merry way...

YMMV of course...=)

I have family scattered to the four winds and my method for maintaining their systems uses the following:

Hamachi (set up to run as a service) - separate networks for various arms of the family
UltraVNC (also running as a service) - so I can connect remotely if I need to
AVG/Microsoft Security Essentials - basic antivirus
Firefox w/Adblock Plus & Web of Trust
Routers set up to use OpenDNS with custom filters (depending on their needs)
Disabling/removing Internet Explorer if at all possible (this usually involves 5 minutes of explaining that the blue E stands for Evil)...=)

With all of the above running the only thing I usually end up fixing is the casual settings-based things or dealing with the occasional hardware failure...YMMV of course...=)

Actually I've gotten the fingerprint reader to work on my T60 in Ubuntu, even from the command line. My guess is that it wouldn't be too terrible to get it working on this machine either...

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader_with_ThinkFinger