I don't know... I think I would rather be eaten by aliens than be brainwashed by my own and subjected to the ever watching eye of big brother... Quick death or lifetime of mental anguish? hmmm
If you use the definition given by Wikipedia of a firewall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall, you will notice that the first generation of firewalls were in fact packet filters. However, as with many words or phrases, definitions change over time. The definition commonly associated with a modern firewall is something more than a simple packet filter like an application layer firewall or stateful filter. For us Linux, Cisco or other old school IT guys, we still refer to a packet filter as a firewall. This person obviously has a more modern, Microsoft, way of thinking of a firewall. That does not give us the right to belittle him and say he does not know what he is talking about. They have a certain level of security, whether you want to call it a firewall or not is your choice. To be perfectly honest, a packet filter is not much with security these days. Most attacks are going to be directed to a certain port to exploit specific software vulnerabilities and these are the attacks that a packet filter cannot handle. A bigger security risk is the fact that they are using unproven software to run their production environment. I personally wouldn't use a new windows OS until, at least, service pack 1 in a production environment. It is always best to wait for software to be proven before it is allowed in a production environment (see Debian GNU/Linux).
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I don't know... I think I would rather be eaten by aliens than be brainwashed by my own and subjected to the ever watching eye of big brother... Quick death or lifetime of mental anguish? hmmm
If you use the definition given by Wikipedia of a firewall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall, you will notice that the first generation of firewalls were in fact packet filters. However, as with many words or phrases, definitions change over time. The definition commonly associated with a modern firewall is something more than a simple packet filter like an application layer firewall or stateful filter. For us Linux, Cisco or other old school IT guys, we still refer to a packet filter as a firewall. This person obviously has a more modern, Microsoft, way of thinking of a firewall. That does not give us the right to belittle him and say he does not know what he is talking about. They have a certain level of security, whether you want to call it a firewall or not is your choice. To be perfectly honest, a packet filter is not much with security these days. Most attacks are going to be directed to a certain port to exploit specific software vulnerabilities and these are the attacks that a packet filter cannot handle. A bigger security risk is the fact that they are using unproven software to run their production environment. I personally wouldn't use a new windows OS until, at least, service pack 1 in a production environment. It is always best to wait for software to be proven before it is allowed in a production environment (see Debian GNU/Linux).