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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Half baked security from MS
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Looks like the XP SP 2 firewall isn't all it should be. It blocks inbound traffic, but does not block outbound. The firewall I use does both; the MS solution allows for malware that manages to get installed to connect out - not good. It also has an API that allows applications to turn it off. Not terribly impressive. Scoble says it's better than nothing - I'm not sure that I agree. Non-technical users (most of the audience) are going to be left with a false sense of security, and won't get something better. You could easily get malware via lax settings in IE (or an older, unpatched Outlook) - and have that malware disable the Firewall using the API. In some ways, this is worse than nothing.
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