Story: SP2's firewall is not good enough

Posted by: Anonymous (Thursday 31 March 2005, 7:06 AM)

Neil Roy wrote: "In fact, when I first installed SP2, I had ZoneAlarm (free version) running, SP2 detected this and it automatically DISABLED Windows Firewall. I thought this was very nice."

This is not a feature of Windows but a feature of Zonealarm itself. Zone Labs coded in their application to the Windows WMI API to automatically turn off the Windows Firewall and to turn it back on if Zonealarm gets uninstalled. If you think that MS did that you are sadly mistaken.

As for the notion thas MS is in a no win situation, if they did not try to bundle everything in to the OS and had proper methodolgies in place for their software engineering they would not be having all the problems with security in the first place. They would not have had to hastly put together this version of their firewall. Admittedly since the Trusted Computing effort MS has gotten better in their software but they have not released too many full version upgrades to most of their software yet. After that has happened, we will really see how well the Trusted Computing initiative has worked.