On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Murphy, Ged (Bolton) wrote:
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous, I can assure you that a firewall is needed.
As can I. And I felt fine without one until I had Windows 2000 and a static IP.
I think the statistics for hooking up an unprotected Windows machine to the internet are something like 10 minutes before it becomes infected.
5-10, or something like that.
Within a day after moving to a static IP (and my reverse-lookup advertises this fact, making me more vulnerable - static-141-149-129-16.buff.east.verizon.net - I got attacked by a worm that ground my system down to a halt and then killed LSASS.EXE, forcing a reboot. Ever since then I have kept my computer firewalled - first by software, and then when that made my computer unusable for some of my vital projects (running the Japanese P2P client Share, for example) I set up a second computer as a firewall. It is that second computer I am sending this mail from (a 486 running Debian Linux).
-uso.