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Posted by Straight Talk on July 30, 2007, 1:27 pm
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>To tell you the truth, Kerry, when a published article from a supposedly
>authoritative source contains even only one such blatant outright lie as
>the one in the above mentioned article,
What lie?
>it casts doubts on the whole
>article, one cannot rely on anything said in the article because it is
>extremely prejudiced and tarnished by some of the false information it
>contains.
What false information?
> Serious publishers, researchers or technical writers would
>automatically correct the false information or pull such flawed
>articles. You won't see companies like Intel publishing seriously
>tarnished articles like the one above.
>
>As for "espousing the usefulness of software firewalls", if they are so
>useless why did Microsoft include one in XP SP2?
Inbound control was never useless. It's the outbound control that's so
questionable.
>I whole heartedly agree with you that some firewall vendors are making
>exaggerated claims in an attempt to sell their products and that some of the
firewalls
>offered by some companies are crappy products, Microsoft too at times
>makes exaggerated claims to sell its products. But long before Windows
>XP and Windows 2000 even came out, many users were using firewalls,
>several *very* good, free personal firewalls were available and were
>being used to protect computers from outside attacks.
Yes. From *outside* attacks. No one questions that they did a good job
there. But the market for PFW's arose only because MS made the big
mistake of shipping windows with exposed network services.
>Microsoft invented nothing new with its firewall.
Wrong.
>Companies like Kerio and Sygate made good free firewalls
This just shows that you don't know what you're talking about. SyGate
didn't even follow the most basic security recommendations from MS,
thereby making your system even more vulnerable.
>long before Microsoft decided that
>it could no longer ship its operating systems without basic firewall
>protection, some companies still make good free firewalls. That there
>are shoddy products out there is a fact, but outbound traffic detection
>has *always* been one of the tasks that any good firewall does and there
>is no reason to label all firewalls that do this as *useless* products
>and there are even fewer reasons to label such a feature as a *useless*
>feature.
>Firewalls do not only deal with malware, they deal with *all*
>traffic, inbound and outbound, and with *all* applications.
And this is where your argument looses completely.
>If the firewall doesn't do outbound monitoring then novice users are left on
>their own to try and detect these things, with outbound connection
>monitoring even advanced experienced users are sometimes surprised to
>find out that certain applications are trying to establish outbound
>connections.
>
>Sure, there are all kinds of malware that can circumvent this
>monitoring, things like rootkits and what not can easily get around
>firewalls.
Root kits aren't meant to get around firewalls.
>That is beside the point, firewalls are not and were never
>meant to be used as virus or rootkit detectors, you need special tools
>to detect and deal with those insidious pests.
BS. You are right that they weren't meant to *detect* these pests. But
being able to block their attempts to call home is *exactly* what PFW
vendors have claimed their products would do.
>Anti virus software cannot detect all or some of those pests and that is what
they are
>supposed to do.
>Should we tar all AV software as useless because they
>can't detect rootkits? Strange that most persons would say no but that
>they would then insist that firewalls that monitor outbound traffic are
>devilishly bad because they can't detect those same rootkits or pests.
There's a big difference between anti-virus meant to stop a baddie
before it's allowed to run and outbound control meant to deal with the
baddie after it's too late.
>I understand that you are passionate on this subject and I don't take
>your posts and comments as personal attacks. I hope that you don't take
>mine as personal attacks against you or anyone else. I too am
>passionate on the issue and I don't like it when good products are all
>tarred at the same time with a wide brush. I am also passionate when I
>read posts saying that outbound traffic monitoring is completely useless
>or that it is completely unnecessary because users should not be
>concerned about outbound traffic on their computers, the logic being
>that only sloppy uninformed users have applications that call home, or
>that you should not be concerned about legitimate applications that
>might be calling home even if they have absolutely no valid reason to do
>so. I am somewhat vindicated by the fact that Microsoft thought that
>this feature was useful enough to be included it in its Vista firewall.
I'm passionate on the issue too and don't like when the WF is labeled
as useless just because it doesn't implement useless trials to control
outbound connections.
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