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I note the same. Many of my friends who allow
their children to have unsupervised access to the
web are very pleased with the results of using
these firewall programs, particularly, Zone Alarm.
However, most of them are computer scientists and
are aware of the issues. It is important for
parents to do this because so many freeware file
sharing systems come bugged.
When the web first kicked into the consciousness
of non-techies, there was a naive but understandable
sense that commercial products would be vetted such
that consumer safety would be a high priority. Now
that the Internet has become a ubiquitous unregulated
utility, the commercial vendors of operating systems
should step up to the challenge of meeting that
expectation and not shunt it off to specialty vendors.
Otherwise, testimonies before the legislative bodies
making claims that business can best promote and
regulate the Internet are not only hollow, but will
rob the businesses of credibility on this issue.
The effect of that will be to see stronger measures,
some misguided, and most punitive.
Put the shelters in before the tornado season.
len
From: Dare Obasanjo [mailto:dareo@microsoft.com]
I believe a number of firewall products already do this. I seem to remember a free version of Zone Alarm that notified me whenever any program tried to connect to the Internet which helped me to discover a trojan version of notepad.exe on my machine.
Windows XP also ships with Internet Connection Firewall[0] which I personally haven't tried out since I still run Win2K at home.
[0] http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/techinfo/planning/firewall/default.asp
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