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Vista To Handcuff Firewall: Page 2 of 4

Still, Peter Pawlak, an analyst with Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft, believes Microsoft's taken a "reasonable position" to disable the outbound capabilities of the Vista firewall.

"It's bad enough with anti-virus and anti-spyware scanners, which ask you to make decisions based on information that you don't have any idea what it's talking about," said Pawlak. "But I just can't imagine individuals dealing with outbound protocols and ports on their own. The idea of an outbound firewall is pretty darn technically tricky for the average user."

The reason why Microsoft's included outbound filtering in Vista, said Pawlak, is to let enterprises lock down systems when they're outside the corporate perimeter.

"When you're using a laptop, there should be some protection that limits the data that you might send. [Outbound] is really for protecting the information on your laptop."

Pawlak was somewhat dismissive of firewalls that catered to consumers and boasted of filtering outgoing traffic. "Vendors have to come up with some sort of set of what they think should be permissible. If you err on the loose side, how much improvement does that make over no firewall at all?