On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 04:13:24 GMT, a?n?g?e?l@lovergirl.lrigrevol.moc.com
(The little lost angel) wrote:

>On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:36:48 -0400, George Macdonald
><fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote:
>
>>I'm not talking about ICS - the service is called "Windows Firewall
>>Internet Connection Sharing" - it is specific to Windows Firewall, is not
>>stopped by turning the firewall off and is started whether you have ICS
>>enabled or not. Most people, myself included, did not know it existed -
>>you'd have to scroll through the Services and it's not always obvious what
>>each service is responsible for... e.g. if you're not using DHCP Client,
>>you cannot turn the service off.
>
>Don't everybody who's even mildly concerned about their system
>security and privacy go through the Services list on a new
>install/update? The "Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing" is
>again one of the first things I disable in Services. I'm usually very
>aggressive about turning things off and only start turning things on
>if other stuff don't work or complain :P

Like I said, it's not always obvious what any service is responsible for...
and things that "don't work" are not always that immediately evident. I
don't go through removing services for which I don't know the consequences.

>>As for trusting "big brother", do you not now religiously download &
>>install Windows Updates? We didn't used to trust that.... until Sasser and
>>SQL Slammer.
>
>In the last six months or maybe more, the only OS updates I downloaded
>for myself were for... Ubuntu Linux :P
>
>I don't really care to let Microsoft muck around with my system unless
>absolutely necessary. For the machines in other people's offices that
>I freelance for, I don't have a say in these matter and let the
>machines do whatever it wants since they don't even have a proper
>firewall on it. I just hook up my laptop to their wireless network
>just for internet access and banned everything from internal network,
>data transfers are faster using flash cards.

Where you have non-expert business users, living without Windows Updates is
not an option any longer. You only have to get burned once.:-(

--
Rgds, George Macdonald