[NCLUG] No more ball and ipchains & Microsoft Hate Mail(TM)

[Jim Ankrum]

B O'Fallon wrote:

> thorson at aster.com wrote:
>
> >  WindowsFU is making connections to strange computers on the net while my wife is 'logged' on and
> > goes away when logged off.
>
> May I suggest that you download and install ZoneAlarm (www.zonealarm.com) on the Windows machine? It's
> free, and is designed to block transmissions from the system unless they are specifically allowed by
> the user, and from the number of reviews its gotten, must be pretty good at this.

I've used it and it does do a pretty good job. It prompts you for your permission the first time any
program tries to access any network (local or internet) then remembers your response. One little
undocumented quirk about it though, if you do anything that is both going over a network and takes over
the screen like full screen games (Unreal, Quake, etc...) you might not see the prompt and it will appear
that your system has locked up. In this case just press the "y" key on your keyboard and zone alarm will
let the program continue. After that you can go back and change the rule for that program if you like.
Took me about a week of cussing and hard reboots until I figured that one out :)
Jim

>
>
> Another thing you might want to do is go to Gibson's Research site(www.grc.com) and use some of his
> diagnostics against your system. He was at one time compiling a list of companies that pull this sort
> of stunt and had developed a program (optout) to tell if they had anything on your system.
>
> BOF
>
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