Kerio or XP SP2 Windows Firewall?

[piaqt]

...and why?

[Aaron]

If you're really paranoid, stick with Kerio. I couldn't see any sign of Windows Firewall using MD5/CRC checking on applications that accessed the Internet. But I could be wrong.

[LouCypher]

Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro is the nicest I've seen to date. I've used Kerio, Tiny, AtGuard, NIS and ZoneAlarm. I started using Outpost after reading great reviews for it and it was one of the few to pass a lot of leak tests the others failed.

[piaqt]

I couldn't see any sign of Windows Firewall using MD5/CRC checking.

Um... What's MD5/CRC checking?

[Aaron]

its a checksum to verify that the file hasn't been modified by a malicious trojan/virus. If it has, its checksum would be different and will be denied by the firewall application.

[piaqt]

OK, what's a checksum?

[pup]

A checksum for a file (or whatever - it could just be a piece of text, a network packet, a word document, ...) is a number that is calculated by performing some calculation using every bit of data in a file. If any single bit of data changes, i.e. the file changes, then the result of the checksum calculation will be different. Depending on the type of processing used, this can make it [almost] impossible for a virus/trojan writer to change a file without the checksum also changing.

An example:

A simple checksum for a series of numbers would just be to add each individual number together, divide by 10 and keep the remainder,

14433234 would be: (1+4+4+3+3+2+3+4) = 24, 24 / 10 = 2 remainder 4, so the checksum would be 4

If any of the numbers change then the checksum would also change. The checksums used by real world applications are much more complicated than this, and the size of the resulting checksum will be much larger, more like 243FA290F43C8E48, but the overall effect is the same.

(I really should get out more)

[Noise]

As opposed to PayCheckSum which is the amount you get after taxes, car payments, rent and food.

[piaqt]

As opposed to PayCheckSum which is the amount you get after taxes, car payments, rent and food.

...and Con Ed, the cable bill, the phone bill, the cellphone bill....