On Friday 16 May 2008 07:39:27 pm lostson wrote: > On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 19:09 -0700, Lee Glidewell wrote: > > On Friday 16 May 2008 07:02:59 pm Paul Johnson wrote: > > > On Friday 16 May 2008 07:01:38 pm lostson wrote: > > > > My 2 cents a default firewall would be nice > > > > > > You mean like Windows has? How about not. Here's why: > > > http://samspade.org/d/firewalls.html > > > > The money quote from that link: > > "So... what does a 'personal firewall' actually do? Well, effectively it > > listens on all the ports on your system. This provides no real additional > > security over turning off the services that you don't use." > > > > The nature and purpose of a "firewall" seems to be greatly misunderstood. > > Personally, I think security vendor hype is as much to blame as naivete. > > So basically a firewall is useless ? Let's get something straight before this gets too complicated: There is nothing wrong with firewalls. However, a firewall is a network design concept of seperating hostile networks from trusted networks. By definition, it requires dedicated hardware. Firewalls aren't useless, they're meant to keep people out of your local network. What is useless are "personal firewalls," such as BlackICE, Windows Firewall, etc.: You aren't gaining anything by running a "personal firewall" on your machine that you wouldn't gain by not running anything that listens on an outside interface to begin with. To make matters far worse, personal firewalls provide a false sense of security and waste computing resources, making them a giant waste of both human and CPU time. -- Paul Johnson baloo@ursine.ca Explaination of .pgp part: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Mail/rant-gpg.html
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