Any Opinions on Personal Firewall???

Have a look at this re: Personal Firewall...???

Any comments?

http://www.samspade.org/d/persfire.html
http://www.samspade.org/d/persfire.html

 

re: Personal Firewalls...???

Any comments, please?

http://www.samspade.org/d/persfire.html

And especially this:

http://www.samspade.org/d/firewalls.html

 

I think your reading the rants of a fed up network administrator, and the leaktest article it points to is from 2000, when these products where first starting to hit the market.
That being said if you do the correct things, what he has said about a NAT router or a NAT router with a built in firewall is basically correct. See this thread url]http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=45731[/url].
A personal firewall just gives you an extra heads up as to what is going on. Now if you don't go through some sort of NAT router/router firewall, broadband or dial-up, than you should definitely have a firewall running on your machine at all times.

 

I mostly agree, however, I feel that any educated user (one who has a decent understanding of basic traffic) is one who can use the personal firewall more efficiently. Sam's article is going off on people who don't understand what normal traffic is and the fact that people get scanned 3000 times an hour etc. That is his point of contention. Not really that the firewalls don't work. They do, they block traffic. Sometimes overly agressive depending on how it is setup and vice versa. The problem lies with inexperienced users and uneducated users in the realm of networking who freak out at the first sign of "something spooky". Personal firewall can be helpful at times but like him, I ALWAYS recommend a hardware device over software and the netgear routers are nice.

If you are on BB and you don't have the funds to purchase a NAT, then a free firewall should cover you. Just don't go apeshit over the bazillion port scans you get.

 

What was the purpose? Was it to convince the average user that software firewalls are a waste of time and money or was it the condescending rant of an elitist expert proclaiming his superior knowledge and contempt for the average, idiot computer user? If his intent was to actually help the "average user" to make an informed choice, he has failed. While his information may be accurate, the insulting tone insures that few average users will read the whole thing. I'd like to see a lot less of this crap and more reasoned articles by people who realize that "computer expert" or "Microsoft-certified professonial" is not the be all-end all of existence.