[NCLUG] zone alarm

[Jim Ankrum]

A post a week or so ago mentioned whether or not windows was calling the
"mother ship". Well, I dual-boot between Win2k and RedHat. I also use
Zone Alarm on the Windows side. Just on a whim I restricted access to ip
ranges 207.68.0.0- 207.68.255.255 and 207.46.0.0- 207.46.255.255 I just
took the first two sets from www.microsoft.com and
windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Now my log in Zone Alarm is filling up
pretty quickly with all the blocking to those ranges.... surprising
actually. One of the sites in particular is www.mcafee.com, I wanted to
update my virus scanner and the first couple times I tried to access
this site explorer just self-destructed with the message "can't write to
memory..... yada yada... activex.microsoft.com". by the time I finally
downloaded my update to the virus scanner (only about 4 clicks from
thier home page to download) Zone alarm had logged 6 blocked attemps to
various xxx.msn.com and xxx.microsoft.com sites. Interesting to say the
least... oh, btw I can no longer use the search feature in IE even if I
choose a specific search engine like yahoo!. everything goes through
msn.com.  Looks like the "mother ship" analogy might not be that far
off.
Jim