Locking Down my Applications

[Bob151]

Considering the way things are going these days, I don't want applications to talk about me. I.E. I don't want quicktime or windows media player to tell anyone what cd or mp3 i play and when. I own almost 200 cds and only about 25 have been digitized so far, but I don't want our new society of RIAA litigators to knock on my door asking to see my cd collection and scan my hard drive.

I've installed ethereal and watched other funny things going on, like TCP Syn flags (w/o ACKs) set on datagrams going outbound when I launch non-internet dependent applications. There destinations are not clear, even when looking them up on arin.net. Probably some data mining outfit.

I have a hardware based firewall, viruscan, and spybot. But maybe that isn't enough.

I want an application that makes me permit an application to talk to the internet. In the past I've noticed that these did that; mcafee firewall, norton int security and zone alarm (which used to be free). I don't want to spend money on some one year license crap from mcafee and norton.

Is there a GPL, freeware product out there that does the same thing reliably and without bloatware (ala norton). I've heard that XP SP2 has this feature, but I can't find it documented, and I'd prefer not to depend on MS for security.

Running XP Pro SP1.

Thanks.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Zone Alarm is free, just not the dressed up version

 

[ttown]

I think "kerio" does this.
I'm dl'ing as we speak, so I haven't personally used it yet.

I use "AtGuard" on my win98 machine (norton bought them (i think) and bloated it up) and it works wonderfully. I wish they made the same thing for XP.

 

[Bob151]

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper
Zone Alarm is free, just not the dressed up version

It doesn't appear that the free download version does that anymore. Looks like that ability is in the "pro" version.

 

[screw3d]

Any decent software firewall will do what you want..

I'm using Sygate and it works fine for me 🙂

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: Bob151

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper
Zone Alarm is free, just not the dressed up version

It doesn't appear that the free download version does that anymore. Looks like that ability is in the "pro" version.

Ver 5.1.033 is what I have active and it stops outbound unless allowed by me

 

[Infohawk]

Check out protowall...

You can block off who ip ranges of unsavory organizations and people... Good if you don't want the music and film industries or spyware people for that matter communicating with you.

 

[Bob151]

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper

Originally posted by: Bob151

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper
Zone Alarm is free, just not the dressed up version

It doesn't appear that the free download version does that anymore. Looks like that ability is in the "pro" version.

Ver 5.1.033 is what I have active and it stops outbound unless allowed by me

Very correct. I've installed it, I must have misread. I'm running it now to check it out.

After that, I may look at Kerio.

 

[screw3d]

Originally posted by: Infohawk
Check out protowall...

You can block off who ip ranges of unsavory organizations and people... Good if you don't want the music and film industries or spyware people for that matter communicating with you.

Hey thanks.. protowall looks good! 🙂

Do you use it in conjunction with another firewall? I feel that it works well that way.