Windows Vista's Firewall offers false sense of security

This is what the top level screen looks like after diving into the Windows Firewall and Advanced Security area of Windows Vista. None of the items in the center are clickable. But the text that says "Outbound connections that do not match a rule are allowed" make it quite clear that all outbound connections are allowed unless a user defined rule explicitly prevents it. We were hoping we could click on that (or right click on it) and flip it to the opposite status (where everything is disallowed unless a rule explicitly allow it), but we couldn't. So, we clicked on "Outbound rules" (top left)

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