Story: SP2's firewall is not good enough

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Hey Neil, open mouth, insert both feet.
Before jumping all over someone, you really should make sure that you've got your facts straight. As the author of the article wrote, the Windows Firewall does _not_ block outbound traffic. You obviously didn't read the message that the firewall threw up for you. It was telling you that an application was trying to listen to an inbound port and was giving you the chance to let it listen or block it from listening. Not even close to blocking outbound traffic.
This is a direct quote from one of the Microsoft docs on SP2:

"Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) includes the Windows Firewall, a replacement for the feature previously known as the Internet Connection Firewall (ICF). Windows Firewall is a stateful host firewall that drops all unsolicited incoming traffic that does not correspond to either traffic sent in response to a request of the computer (solicited traffic) or unsolicited traffic that has been specified as allowed (excepted traffic). This behavior of Windows Firewall provides a level of protection from malicious users and programs that use unsolicited incoming traffic to attack computers. With the exception of some Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) messages, Windows Firewall does not drop outgoing traffic."

Try to get your facts straight. Where do you work so I know to avoid the place?

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