Comment by p_ing
12 days ago
I don’t see what the issue is with the dev tools used. VS is nice as it has always been. Wix is very convenient and makes building msi ez. But I wonder why the dev thought a 3rd party Windows fw was necessary.
12 days ago
I don’t see what the issue is with the dev tools used. VS is nice as it has always been. Wix is very convenient and makes building msi ez. But I wonder why the dev thought a 3rd party Windows fw was necessary.
> But I wonder why the dev thought a 3rd party Windows fw was necessary
Because windows' built-in firewall is of static nature, and as such, useless in the personal firewall role.
What does "static nature" mean, in your parlance?
Windows Firewall, similar to IPtables, can only be set to on or off per rule. Yes, you can configure it however you like, but it has zero interaction with the user while it's running (except for a simple on/off checkbox on first socket listen occurrence).
In contrast, traditional third-party firewall programs for Windows were always fully interactive and would offer much finer control in that way. Something we would call a personal firewall. A personal firewall would allow users to inspect and control each and every network interaction (not just LISTEN).
Ever since I found a folder on my drive titled "xxx was here", back in 1999, on windows, I've been using a personal firewall. Changed many over the years, and now running Fort.
https://github.com/tnodir/fort
3 replies →
I am assuming they're referring to TinyWall's "allowlist this process" or time-based rule capabilities. Windows Defender firewall can allowlist applications, but you have to feed it a path to the executable image.
Such things have been around for ages - I remember getting a free license somehow for a host-based IDS back in the Windows Vista times (struggled to look it up but I believe it was SAX2 by Ax3soft). It had some interesting features but running on an underpowered laptop the overhead cost more frustration than it was worth.