Windows Vista's Firewall offers false sense of security

Once installed, Vista stopped us from running Firefox until we manually approved it. That's a good idea because, like with our attempt to run the firewall configuration tool, the computer has no way of knowing whether the user at the keyboard launched the software, or if some other software (potentially malware) launched it. So, with this safety feature, it doesn't matter who launched it. The user has to approve the launch.

For David Berlind's write-up on Vista's inadequate personal firewall, see his blog post in ZDNet's TestBed blog.