>What I find very annoying is that we have now to rely on:
> - Firewall
> - Antivirus
> - Spam filters
> - Spyware removers
>
>What will be next. At some point, I guess that more than 50% of our CPUs will be running security/privacy services. Isn't it becoming horrible?

It's ridiculous, in fact. I have so much security SW at home it's a joke! I feel very safe, but at what cost in $$, scheduling periodic full-scans, and paranoia?

One thing I'd like to see is someone integrate all this various SW into one really good package, instead of 3-4-5 different tools, and the ones like spyware tools, you seem to need 2 or 3 to catch every possible spyware. McAfee is trying, by using a console approach, but it's still composed of modules of your above list - and which don't always work together as well as they might...

The only really nice improvement recently is that my ISP has a glorious Spam-filter/AV-checker at the mail-server level. I get no more than 3-4 spams a week now. I have to go logon online to check my mail-server's Quarantine box about weekly, just to be sure nothing of interest is filtered out, but even that has improved so much that I very seldom find anything but spam and cleaned viruses in the Quarantine box. One small step for mankind...