Iranian Coffeenets: protect yourself from viruses

The following paragraph jumped out at me from the guide book over the weekend as I was blobbed out on the couch doing 'research':

Unfortunately, Iranian coffeenets are badly infected with viruses. During this research trip our USB memory stick picked up more than 50 viruses, worms, Trojan horses, key-loggers and other nasties. So be careful about doing internet banking unless the anti-virus software is up to date, and scan carefully before sticking anything into your your own computer that has been in an Iranian machine. (July 2008 Lonely Planet Iran)

I don't use Windows on any of my computers - I use Linux. Recent advances in Linux mean that it's now possible to have a complete, bootable installation of Linux on a memory stick, with room left over for another partition for your data - photos, text, whatever. It struck me that a very useful option would be to use a bootable USB stick in Iranian coffeenets (Internet cafes) - it'll just depend on how amenable the owners are on letting me reboot their boxes and fiddle with BIOS boot-order settings. Assuming that some at least will be cool about it, I've made myself a bootable, writable Linux distro on a stick by following these short, simple and clear instructions.

The newest Ubuntu distribution, 8.10, includes a utility for making a bootable USB stick too, though I haven't tried this yet.