I was on the phone with cable teck. support and he told me that I dont really need to have a firewall 'cause I was running WinMe. I always had one before but he said there is only 1 port anyone can scan and if they wanted to they could probably get into my comp. anyways. Is this guy full of sh!t or does he have a point? I would rather not run the firewall(zonealarm) because of the system resourses it takes but its best to error on the side of caution right? Is there accually anyway to be completely protected besides turning your machine off?
George.

Jeesh ,, the traffic log on my Sygate Personal Firewall must be inventing hoaxes, it reports lots of scans of lots of different port numbers ( there's only about 65,000 of them on a PC ), and I only have a dial-up.
What does this Cable tech guy know that the rest of the PC world doesn't.

Last I heard, Win ME doesn't have a built in firewall, only XP has, but it's reportedly been compromised by all the script kiddies worth the name.

Maybe that kinda tech support will tell you to open file shares on the net next.
Maybe he needs to open his personal file share over a toilet. ;)

But don't take my word on it, I's just a hobby tech. Go do some reading at www.grc.com and www.pcflank.com

the chances of getting hacked and winning the lottery are about the same for a home pc. There is WAAAAY too much paranoia among home users and it is ridiculous. As for the WinME part of it, OS doesn't really matter if you aren't going to get hacked anyway but, I must say that by his own rationale he is wrong. Win9x OS's are the least secure so I don't get his logic. Just don't enable file and printer sharing to be careful and you'll be fine, don;t get taken in by all the paraniod users here...

Personally i dont use a firewall. I dont wear a seatbelt either. Are those who do paranoid?

If you lock your front door at night you should be running a firewall. Door locks dont keep criminals out of homes but they do present a challenge that gets rid of the less determined robber.

Bad analogy? Probably :)

I remember when we were the testers for Roadrunner cable in the Kansas City area several years ago. Our neighborhood in Midtown got cable internet access before anyone else. It was incredibly fast.

One of the little things we discovered was that by going to Network neighborhood and clicking on the workgroup for our cable "lan", we could easily access any of our neighbor's computers that happened to have File and Print sharing installed. It was cool.

I would say that if you are on a 56k modem... no, a firewall is not necessary. But if you are on Cable or DSL, I would definately have one.

At the very least... unistall file and print sharing.:p:p:p

We had lots of fun looking at what our neighbors had installed and where they frequented on the net.

that is a very old topology that you are referring to on the cable setup, newer ones are not the same...

I take it most of you feel the same way I do then, quess firewall is a go. Thanks for your responses and the time it took.
George.

Although the point of most of this discussion has been about holding off cracker intrusions, another purpose of a good firewall is to allow some control ove what is sent OUT from your machine.
Between over active Cookies, Spyware and similar slimeware, entrepenuers who think it's a good thing to bundle their new distributed com foistware in with unrelated software ( see Kazaa and Brilliant) to abuse unsuspecting PC owners, there's more than enough reason to control what goes out. If for no other reason than to control access to your own bandwidth. All of those background transmissions use YOUR connection, and limit the speed of the traffic you WANT to have access to.

If you don't wanna run a firewall give me your ip addy.... Sheeezzzzzzzzz.

If your worried about system resourses try a lean and mean firewall. Sygate and neowatch are excellent choices.

Yeah sure you might never get hacked but as it has been stated above spyware is a big problem.

Zinc

Yep, firewall is not only for incoming traffic, it also looks after what is going out.

I have only had net for 3 months. Two months ago I get ZoneAlarm and it started to give alarms of programs trying to get out to internet, TSAdBot and CTB...(something). It woke me up, and I started to study what are these guys. Spyware, I learned. And so I find also Netpal and Commonname spyware programs which goes thru firewall with browser, from my computer.

So, without a firewall my computer would be sending data out to somewhere with help of four spyware programs. But not anymore. Hopefully.

I agree with shyfly. Most people only worry about incoming connection in their computer. Most firewall (if not correctly configured) do allow any outgoing trafic initiated by spywares, trojans and ircbots.

If you don't care about your security, please take 2min of your time thinking about thousands peoples and corporations that may be attacked on your behalf by an hackers.

IMHO, criminals are not the hackers themselfs, but the lazy peoples that make their computers available for thoses attacks.