Beyond witty sarcasm do you have anything else to offer, such as
Why skip the witty sarcasm? It's so much fun!
My preferred alternative
would be to set the firewall to its original setting and go have a nice cold
fermented beverage. It will have about the same effect on your security as
continuing the pointless quest to block malicious outbound traffic.
Can anyone please provide me a reasonable alternative to meet this
requirement then? I want to prevent applications from accessing the internet
without my OK.
If all you want is an alert then install OneCare Live. It works on Vista and
alerts you when non-malicious programs access the Internet. Of course, it
goes without saying that it won't be able to alert you when malicious program
does the same.
If you actually want to stop malicious programs that are already executing
as you from communicating out then your options are things like disconnecting
the network cable or blocking all outbound traffic entirely and running as a
standard user.
What I am trying to explain to you is that you cannot permit some software
that runs as a particular user to connect out and still meaningfully block
other software, running in the same user context, from connecting out. In
Windows Vista you *can* block services running as one user from connecting
out using permitted connections from another service running in the same user
context. That functionality is new to Vista, but it is already enabled by
default and requires no additional configuration. On Windows XP doing so was
impossible, both with the Windows Firewall and any third-party add-on. On
Windows XP outbound host-based firewall filtering was completely meaningless.
In Windows Vista all the meaningful filtering is already there by default.
There is no reason to waste time trying to "improve" it because the
fundamental facts about how software runs on Windows NT-based operating
systems does not permit host-based firewall filtering to provide any value.
I am well aware that there are third-party firewalls that claim the ability
to block outbound traffic as the main reason to buy them. That type of claim
used to be called snake-oil. Today it is called an "Internet Security Suite".
It provides no discernible security value and serves only to aggravate the
user using it and enrich the unscrupulous vendor producing it.
In summary:
You cannot stop malicious programs running as you on your computer from
communicating outbound. Focus on stopping the malicious programs from running
on your computer instead.
