Firewall Wizards mailing list archives

RE: Annoying pop-ups


From: "Scott, Richard" <Richard.Scott () BestBuy com>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 15:30:47 -0600

<snip>
      While, generally speaking, I agree with the premise that dangerous 
services should have to be turned on not off, you guys miss my point 
entirely.  There are many "dangerous" features in MS's desktop OS's (take 
UPNP or the RDP server, for example)-- but the messenger service is not one 
of them.  The service provides useful functionality used by admins all over 
to broadcast messages to their LAN's (particularly easy and useful in flat 
environments).
</snip>

You have reinforced my argument.  How many people bought XP and use it on a
LAN?  Forget us Geeks, we know what to do.  But what about Little James, or
Mary Poppins or in fact any other millions of regular users?

I agree, maybe this should have been switched on in an Enterprise edition
(if at all!) maybe, definitely not a home version.

Whilst, I mention MS, I am not bashing them, all vendors do it, but most
vendors do not have the majority of their market share owned by regular
users.  And correct me if I am wrong, Bill wants MS O/S on every PC on every
desk.

Firewalling is a technical solution to a technical problem, agreed.  But
what we have is a fundamental problem, not just with this but other
functionality to.


I agree, if you read this list you are more than a techno savy person.  But
not everyone does, they tend to hear it from the register or some other news
web site.

It is not the non geeks that must step up to the plate, as geeks, vendors
and techno dudes we must provide systems that are usable and safe.  
Maybe if the legal system was like you rationale, we wouldn't be able to use
litigation since we are all supposed to be knowledgeable about everything.



<snip>
P.S.  Forget your "they should have made it different in the first place"
argument for a moment and answer this:  If your dear sweet grandmother was
going to hook her Windows 98 machine up to her shiny new cable modem, and
you were the one helping her do it, would you turn off all the services and
build some sort of weird bastion98 installation, or would you just firewall
it?  (Either by buying a packet-filtering/NATing cable modem, or by
installing some personal firewall software like ZA?)   What's that?  You'd
firewall it?  Go figure.
</snip>

Agreed.  But well design usability covers all of this.  Should I want this I
should easily be able to get it working.  Should I require all the other
technical solutions?
Why should anyone help dear grandma in the first place?  Shouldn't the
system work exactly how it is. If I am on high speed network solely from
home, why would grandma want the messenger functionality?  In fact, what
benefit would such messages be?
Separate the end users and the techno geeks.  Maybe we wil have home managed
solutions for such in the future!

Cheers
r.


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