Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

It's really a shame to see how many holes their are in this product. It's actually a nice (looking) product! It claims to handle everything for you: Firewall, antivirus, spyware. It even an option to let you run an app in (what it calls) a "sandbox" if you suspect the app might be harmful.

I had it installed on my Win 7 laptop for the past five years. It was a program that did alot to make you feel like it was protecting you, such as displaying a pop-up whenever:

- An app tried to connect to the internet

- An app tried to execute or communicate with another app

- An app tried to modify the registry

- An app tried to read keyboard/mouse input

Part of it could be rather annoying (particularly when some applications like Crashplan would try to auto-update and fail during the night because I wasn't at my keyboard to approve the connection attempt that Comodo blocked), but it did feel secure. After the last Comodo gaffe[0], however, I finally said enough and uninstalled Comodo Internet Security and went with GlassWire instead for my firewall.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021633

This kind of popups is exactly the psychological manipulation that vendors use to make you feel good about using their products. Same for "cleanup" apps which show a satisfying progress bar of how your device is "cleaned of all bad things".

To be honest, I really like the approach of network blocking. If you strip everything bad from that product and leave just the interactive firewall - it's great! Mainly because it's a whitelist rather than blacklist - so you need to spend time configuring it, but then it really does the right thing.

Or at least tries to... does windows security expose the actual network connection hooks to personal firewalls, or do they have to fight for dll hooks in the same way as malware?

Why not just use your operating system's firewall? Why install some 3rd party firewall?

Because it (assuming you are using Windows) lacks features and fine grained controls? IE also comes with OS, but that doesn't mean one should not look for alternatives.

Windows really doesn't have a firewall with features comparable to other operating systems?

I suppose Microsoft's point of view could be that they don't want users to accidentally screw themselves while trying to open a port for BitTorrent, for example. I wonder what percentage of Windows users end up installing 3rd party spyware garbage to get a "real" firewall?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com