GEN-MEDIEVAL-L Archives

Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 2000-04 > 0954634275


From: "tiglath" <>
Subject: Re: AUE needs help from a JavaScript programmer
Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 19:11:15 -0500


"Renia Simmonds" <> wrote in message
news:...
> Apparently, a firewall is a good idea if you are permanently on-line, but
> not so necessary if you are disconnected for much of the time.

Close but not exactly. A firewall is a good idea if you run a server
machine with lots of connections COMING IN. Same as it is a good idea to
have a receptionist when you have lots of visitors and customers. A
typical home system has no visitors. You can be connected all day in a home
system and your firewall will do mostly nothing other than rob you of
bandwidth and slow you surfing noticeably. The biggest danger is in what
the user brings in from the outside himself. The two pernicious objects you
can bring in are viruses and trojan horses. A good anti-virus program is
adequate defense from the former, as long as you keep it current, the latter
requires user education. Security is not only hard to achieve but also
very inconvenient. The more secure a system is the least fun it becomes to
use. Activex controls are an example; unlike Java applets, they are
inherently insecure; if you have a firewall you can ban Activex controls
from your system, but what fun is it? Many, many sites use them. Starting
with Microsoft windows update site, a must to keep you machine current.
Please note that the fears of Activex controls, as someone else pointed out,
has been unfounded so far. Even if you curtail you fun and complicate the
administration of your system by orders of magnitude by installing a
firewall, it is only an incremental step, offering no guarantees. This
means that you still need to have a good disaster recovery strategy in
place. For home a use a firewall is much ado for very little gain. I have
a firewall because I must, and I hate it; I keep a PC not connected to it to
surf, do the newsgroups, and have fun unfettered.

Perhaps Mr. Hines SHOULD get a firewall, we would hear less from him as he
struggles to get his junk through it.

This thread: