Slashdot Mirror
Windows XP Firewall Bug Flies Under the Radar
echocharlie writes "Last Friday, the Computer World reported a quiet update to Windows XP that fixed a bug in the Windows Firewall included in SP2. Gary Schare, Director of Windows Product Management, said it was 'an unfortunate oversight.' The update wasn't mentioned in Microsoft's Security Bulletin even though it's listed as critical because it's a configuration change, not a software fix. The bug may cause shared files and printers to be accessible by others on the Internet. Unfortunate, indeed. Patch those boxes."
I put off the SP2 upgrade for months because I heard of all the trouble that came with the fixes. I had my XP box set to tell me of patches but not install them. Then, in a fit of carelessness, I just clicked on the darned "Apply updates" dialog. I am used to being asked which of the patches I want but this time it just shot the whole wad into my poor machine. I got WMP10, I got DRMcrap.dll's up the wazoo, I got icons all over my desktop. Nero, which had been burning stuff for me flawlessly stopped working with "no access permission for D: drive" or some such message. It took some fooling around to get Nero back and to keep WMP from running all my different media file types....arggghh!
and to top it all off, thinking they couldn't screw it up any worse than it was, I let XP run auto-updatable. Well, now I know that I endured SP2 just to get a buggy firewall config and that I can expect unannounced patches to blow away my session whenever I turn my back.
I swear I don't need this. I run Open Office and Cygwin on the damned machine anyway. If somebody could show me a URL and a few lines of commands to FTP down a decent BSD or Linux distro meant for the windows-competent but Linux-challenged, I'd flush the XP crap all the way back to Redmond.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
use an external firewall, one you can trust, one that ONLY does routing/firewalling.
sp2's fw is nice to have. but not SUFFICIENT to have.
that about sums it up.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So you can't keep an XP box running, good job.
You want Linux? Try fedora.redhat.com
Don't want Fedora, try googling for something.
And about cutting it short to get first post.. WTF for?
This isn't K5, grow up.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.