Windows Vista's Firewall offers false sense of security

Finally, we went down the custom path hoping that once we picked Firefox, that we could be selective about what Internet domains Firefox could access. As you can see from the buried dialog box, we were hoping to answer the question of which remote IP addresses to include in the rule with a domain instead of an IP address. We could run a trace to the domain to get the IP address, but the physical IP address could change. Working off domain would be better. Sometimes, where we've been instructed to enter an IP address, domain has worked. So, we tried it here (but with no luck as you can see). This led us to some sage advice for you: be sure to tell grandma to jot down her most despised IP addresses before configuring the outbound blocking on her Windows firewall. Better yet, just tell her to get a firewall from another security vendor (and disable the Windows one).

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