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May 22, 2008
Tall Emu kicks your firewall down
The business case for the Bleeding Edge Outroduction Agency is clear and compelling. Over the years, through various introduction agencies — magazines, Web sites, indeed this very column — people meet and fall in love with fetching applications and then refuse, despite appalling abuse and serial infidelities, to abandon their now toxic relationships.
Who knows what misery these people go through as a result of these attachments? They apparently feel that once having been conjoined, they must remain so, despite all evidence of an irretrievable breakdown of the relationship.
These people are clearly the software world's equivalent of devout Catholics. They need an external agency, much like the Catholic Marriage Tribunal, which can examine the circumstances of a marriage for potential "defects of form", and make a canon law declaration of nullity, allowing the parties to continue to receive the Sacraments after a divorce.
A couple of incidents in the past week or so alerted us to the need for the Bleeding Edge Outroduction Agency. The first was a post on the Bleeding Edge forum in which a reader declared that he'd been using the email client The Bat! ever since we'd recommended it in a column. The program had recently come out in a Vista version, but since that release, could no longer be set as the default email client in Windows XP.
We went through our columns using our favourite desktop search application, Copernic, and discovered that it had been roughly six years since we'd publicly abandoned The Bat!. We'd announced our formal separation in a column published in October 2002, shortly after we began using the powerful IMAP email features of FastMail.
Obviously the reader had missed our version of a Catholic annulment, or possibly a Papal dispensation.
Then we received an email seeking our latest recommendations were for a firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware applications. The reader had been experiencing slow start-up times using Windows XP Home edition, and wondered if his existing complement – the Sygate free firewall, CA Anti-virus, Windows Defender and Spybot — were at fault. Our first suggestion for him would be to turn off the Windows firewall, which he had running in tandem with Sygate.
But in mid 2005 we'd announced that we'd stopped using the Sygate firewall when Norton —one of this column's bete noirs — took over the company.
We'd used Zone Alarms free firewall until late last year, when we'd begun recommending the free Comodo firewall.
More recently, however, we've been very impressed by a firewall called Online Armor. Based in Sydney, it has quickly developed an international reputation. With Comodo it's the only product to score 100 per cent on the firewall ratings table at the highly reputable matousec.com.
Online Armor reinvents the firewall category, adding new layers of protection inherited from its origins as a guardian against bank phishing, and hijacking of Web browsers. It can detect the presence of keystroke loggers lurking in the background to capture sensitive financial information. In "banking mode" it can restrict your browser to genuine secure banking sites, and it detects and resists any Website or other tampering. You can examine the list of features.
The irony is that when Tall Emu offered the product to Australian banks, to protect their users from the growing problem of Internet fraud, they simply weren't interested. The banks suggest common anti-virus and malware programs provide adequate protection, but they manifestly do not. The fact that they might have had a cheap, infinitely safer alternative but rejected it, suggests our banks are neglecting their duty to online customers.
Happily, the fact that Tall Emu was forced to reinvent its product as a firewall has resulted in a compelling security solution.
The 9.6MB download searches for any dangerous processes on installation, then checks your Start menu and startup applications against its database, alerting you to the ones it doesn't know about, and prompting you to allow them Internet access, or block them.
You can run the program in three modes: standard, advanced, or banking mode. Standard mode provides excellent protection with the minimum of inconvenience and bewilderment that too often follows a firewall installation. Unless you really know what you're doing, we'd recommend you don't use advanced mode. You can engage banking mode on demand with a hotkey combination.
There are three versions: a free one which still gives you access to Banking Mode, a paid edition which we think is worth the investment of $US39.95, and one which bundles the Kaspersky anti-virus program. As we've written recently, we like Kaspersky's anti-virus capabilities, but we've found slow updates make it unusable. Our current recommendation is NOD32.
Tall Emu expects to have a Windows Vista version within weeks.
The Bleeding Edge Outroduction Agency now officially declares your firewall marriage null and void. You have our permission, indeed our encouragement, to switch to Online Armor.
Posted by cw at May 22, 2008 12:28 PM
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Comments
Sygate has served me very well and CA anti-virus has served me very well too, especially with its minimal impact on windows' boot time (one of my highest priorities!). But it looks like their time has come. Oh well, as they say - onward and upward :)
Posted by: raoul at May 22, 2008 05:58 PM
Hi Charles,
have followed your advice and installed the free online-Armor but with XP-Home SP-3 my system will not shut down. Before I buy the full version of online-Armor just wanted to check with you for comments.
Cheers,
John Gutteridge
Posted by: John Gutteridge at May 22, 2008 08:44 PM
Hi John,
Sounds like one or more of the entries in your Programs list needs trusting.
Installing SP3 can sometimes force OA to reacquire these permissions.
I'd be looking at obvious filenames, such as those with logon in them, programs that suggest services so filenames like *svc.exe, failing that, take at look at what's running in Task Manager before closing down and see if that gives you a clue to what needs trusting.
If you don't feel able to safely identify the likely suspect(s), please go along to Online Armor's support forum.
Posted by: Dark Matter at May 23, 2008 02:58 AM
we like Kaspersky's anti-virus capabilities, but we've found slow updates make it unusable.
Charles, what exactly happens too slowly? If updating trickles along in the background, what's the problem?
Posted by: David Horwood at May 26, 2008 05:13 PM
I could imagine circumstances where definitions trickling along in the background could be a problem. You're exposed to new viruses until the trickle is complete.
But in our experience a trickle would be a torrent compare to the speed of Kaspersky. Obviously not everyone is affected by it, but if you are - and a lot are - it is, as I wrote, unusable.
Posted by: cw at May 26, 2008 07:06 PM