Top 15 Security Apps - An Aside

I recently read an article - and I won’t cite my reference here for various reasons - that espoused their point of view. Well fair enough, after all that is what this freedom of speech thing is all about surely. However, what I took to not liking, and I am probably equally to blame here, is that the blogger didn’t cite any references for his assertions or backup his statements with references.

So why am I discussing this here? Because I’m disappointed that my polite efforts at feedback have been roundly ignored. Other comments have been OK’d that appear to be far more critical than mine so I guess the only reason mine was deleted is that I’d written a riposte elsewhere and linked to it. They, to date (4 weeks), haven’t taken up my offer of eMailing me to discuss why my comment was deleted - and there was I under the obviously wrong impression that bloggers wanted readers who commented!

I have no issue with most of the article, but these lines got me all a quiver: “Don’t even consider ZoneAlarm or Comodo. No one needs a software firewall above the one built into Windows itself”.

OK, so they did soften that a little with “Instead use a hardware NAT router which acts as a firewall”.

Whilst accurate the article is very over-simplistic without stating, beyond the obvious one liner, why people shouldn’t consider software firewalls. More pertinently they don’t go on to elucidate or point out where one could read up on the alternative he suggests.

I’d agree that ZoneAlarm in its free version shouldn’t be used - at least not whilst its performance continues to be well below par of its paid for brother. Comodo gets good reviews and very favourable tech write ups so again the one line dismissal is strange.

At heart is the blogger taking PC World to task for their recently published article on the Top 15 Free Security Apps one should have and use (not necessarily all the time) - at least they had the decency to explain their reasonings as to why they picked the apps they did. This blogger elected to rip into it with little to no reason or explanation.

As I say, I do tend to agree with him, but telling non techies not to use software firewall is tantamount to touting for business - and that just doesn’t seem right to me.

[tags]security, firewall, comments, zonealarm, PC World[/tags]