Re: Unknown download activity in background - how to determine what it is?
On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:11:12 -0300, John John <audetweld@nbnet.nb.ca>
wrote:
>Kayman wrote:
<snip>
>Did you know that some of the new Sysinternal (Microsoft) utilities call
>home without your knowledge?
You mean it contacts crl.microsoft.com? Uhhhhh.. big deal....
>Did you know that these Sysinternal utilities
>do not tell you that they call home and that they provide no inbuilt
>mechanism to stop this behaviour?
Wrong.
>Do you agree that those applications, amongst others, should be calling home
>without the user's knowledge?
Why are you running utilities from a company you don't trust? In fact,
with your obvious hostility towards MS, why are you running windows in
the first place?
>There are many other legitimate applications that call home for no
>valid reasons, when you install these application they don't always tell
>you that they will be calling home and they don't always make it easy to
>find that out or to disable "call home" features.
Any program you didn't code yourself is going to do a lot of things
without asking you for permission.
Legitimate programs for obvious reasons don't need to be controlled.
Furthermore, an outbound control measure is not going to indicate in
any way if what it's doing is good or bad. You just have a
preconceived opinion about it being bad (which just proves that you
are running software you don't trust).
<snip>
>The misinformation published in one of
>the Microsoft articles provided by another poster makes it clear that
>Microsoft and its shills are on a mission to discredit all firewalls
>that monitor outbound connections
or they just know their own OS well enough to realize that host-based
outbound control as a security measure against malware is a lost
battle.
>and to insist that the Microsoft
>firewall is somehow or other superior to all others.
In some areas it is.
<snip>
>Also, the firewall will be using resources just to do its basic job of
>keeping intruder out, the little extra needed to monitor outbound
>connections is negligible.
Do you realize the number of kernel hooks necessary to accomplish such
a task? And still it isn't even close to being reliable.
You probably also never considered the increase in attack vectors
introduced by PFW's.