Richard Campbell wrote:
I'm sorry but the windows firewall is a joke. It can be controlled from the command line, i can even add my own rule without the user ever knowing.
So can the Linux firewall. The only major difference is that Windows runs by default as an administrator, and can have multiple administrators, so everyone that uses it has those permissions by default. Note that while I haven't tried it, I suspect that a regular user can't change that, since you can disable the command line and command line scripts entirely for a regular user.
That's a problem with the current structure of the Windows system. This is something that Microsoft has stated that they'll improve on in the future, though, I don't know if they're still following it. Rumor had it a while back that the release after Vista would be one that had a better permissions system that would allow users to have more customized abilities and roles in the system so that regular users would become easier to implement in the system. You can sort of do this with Windows XP, but it's still somewhat hard to do - there's no real mechanism of allowing the user to just play in their home directory like there is with UNIX and UNIX-like systems. The infrastructure is there, but it's highly error-prone and hard to use ATM.
- Mike