I share the view you suggest regarding commercial practices like Symantec's,
but the Devil's advocate in me points out how contrary this is to the good,
tried-and-true, 'capitalist model' that is so widely used as an excuse for
everything under the sun.
After all, Symantec paid good money to remove competition.
They should get value for their money.
Value for money invested is more important than the short-term general
public good, after all. Naturally staying employed is the public citizen's
most pressing interest, and who else will employ them, especially since it
is a given that only big business is efficient (at crowding out the smaller
competitors).
The Sherman and Clayton anti-trust acts, if they have not been totally
eviscerated by this time, should be ignored insofar as is possible, since
everyone knows big money would never do anything to the detriment of the
public. After all, the welfare of the country is in everyone's interest,
and they wouldn't do anything to harm their own interests, would they?
But if they happened to, by accident, of course, they could be paid money by
the government (the conservative government, of course, doing its
'conservation') to fix it. And if there were any problems in how that might
look, why just pay off a few politicians--after all, big money *has* the
money!

hth!
Joe
"Vanguard" <vanguard.code@comcastNIX.net> wrote in message
news:eIJDZoQEGHA.3920@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
> "Galen" <galennews@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:O12JYWQEGHA.3148@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> >
> > Firewalls - Basics:
> > http://kgiii.info/windows/all/securi...ls-basics.html
>
>
> Note the Sygate got bought by Symantec who promptly killed the product
which
> was their intent (and it has been with other competing products that they
> have acquired in the past). Be aware that many of the features mentioned
> for firewalls in many reviews is against the paid or Pro version and not
the
> freebie version.
>
> You can do a Google to find product keys published online for the Sygate
> Personal Firewall Pro (stick with the prior 5.5 version and not the 5.6
> version). Obviously you are cracking the product to, ahem, steal it, but
> are you really stealing when you are grabbing something out of someone's
> garbage that they threw away? I leave it to you to figure out your ethics
> regarding digging in someone else's software trashbin and despite that
doing
> such will affect absolutely no loss in revenue for a product that Symantec
> deliberately trashed. It's not like you can actually buy the firewall
from
> Symantec so they cannot lose any revenue on it. For sure they still
retain
> their intellectual property rights to it.
>
> Some reviews will tout the DLL authentication feature of Sygate. However,
> it had a vulnerability in version 5.5 for which there was never a report
> that it got fixe in version 5.6. Also, DLL authentication is flaky. It
> will report DLLs that are not called by a program so I don't know on what
> event Sygate is triggering. For example, a background program that has no
> I/O (no window and no keyboard or mouse input) will alert that a Logitech
> DLL was called, yet if you use SysInternals' File Monitor you will not see
> any calls made to that DLL. What Sygate is using for its trigger
regarding
> which program is calling another is flawed, so disable that flaky feature.
> You'll be answering prompts forever, even after authorizing the access and
> later getting the same prompt for the same program and DLL, and getting it
> again and again. Otherwise, I like the Sygate firewall a lot.
>
> The Sygate firewall is just a firewall. It is not censorware. That means
> it will not block ads. It does its job very well because it did not
devolve
> into bloatware. It has an IDS (intrusion detection system) which will
> become stale due to the lack of any updates after Symantec killed off the
> product. You can use the free Prevx 1R product to compensate by adding
its
> IDS function (the 1R full-function version is beta, always will be, and
why
> they offer it for free; the old Prevx Home free but reduced functionality
> version is no longer available).
>
>