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I have experimented with music composition for a while now. I never really learned how to read music, so when I found a piano that I could play at, I would just do things that sounded good to me.

With the modern PC, you can get composition software that has 100’s of instruments that you can use, all controlled from a plugin keyboard.  So I began composing just as a hobby. Much of my music is simple, and my technical skills are far from professional. It is only recenly that I have started sharing my music with others.

I created a music page where you can listen to many of my songs. They are all instrumental.

So give the site below a listen if you want, and feel free to post me a comment via this blog.

http://www.reverbnation.com/stevehalpern

Note: There is another  ”Steven Halpern” that does new age and meditation style music.  That is not me (although my full name is Steven also)… I guess I can be best identified as the Steve Halpern who started Flight One Software.

Firewall software can break your system.

Is that a pretty strong statement?

I will explain how and why.

Windows XP and Vista firewalls are entirely capable of putting your computer in complete stealth mode, meaning that even though your computer is connected to the Internet, it is completely invisible. Look for the ShieldsUp test at www.grc.com. You will likely find that you are completely invisible.

Yet, many people go ahead and install 3rd party firewall software, not knowing that the default XP firewall, and especially the lastest Vista firewall, are entirely adequate in protecting them, plus, not knowing in many cases that they also have a broadband or router firewall additionally between them and the Internet. But unknowingly they install a firewall that can cause more trouble compared to any gains.

But what about outbound packets? From my understanding, Vista does a better job at blocking outbound packets. But regardless, the concern with outbound packets would be if you had some type of trojan, virus, or spyware on your computer. It could then send outbound packets to other computers through your Internet connection. And that is NOT a good thing!

But, for that to happen, you have to have a trojan, virus, or spyware application on your system in the first place. And if it got there, it is likely because you let it get there by installing untrusted or unchecked software, or have highly neglected updating your operating system (e.g. using Windows Update).

If you know how to properly use your virus scanner and update your system, you should never really be at risk. So, if you have nothing bad on your system, then why cause many potential headaches by installing a 3rd party firewall program?

Windows connects to the Internet through some standard protocols. This is controlled by your system through DLL’s and other system executables. 3rd party firewalls affect the communication process by putting a filter into this “subsystem” of your computer. And this is done differently by the various vendors out there. And some vendors are responsible and let you control these filters easily, and some do not give you control, or some say they give you control and then do not. You may think it is disabled, but it is not! In this latter case, you now have a “broken” computer!

We have seen cases here at Flight1 where users said they disabled their 3rd party firewall, only to still have problems connecting to the Internet with our e-commerce application (which uses standard Windows API’s for network communications). They then had to uninstall the software to get things working because disabling the firewall did not work. In a few worst cases, some customers had to do a system rollback to get things working.

This is not to say that all firewalls do not work! If a good firewall properly detects the new application trying to connect to the Internet, and then prompts you about it, and gives you the ability to allow the application to connect unhindered, then you are likely using a well thought out and properly designed firewall, and there is no harm.

So the firewall rule is… as long as you get proper firewall prompts that accept the settings that you set, and if it remembers your adding the application to it’s “allow” list, then if you want a firewall, then no problem.

But so often we have to support customers that have trouble because of a firewall. They installed it because they saw that it won many awards at this or that site, and now things are broken.

All firewalls MUST allow you to simply add any program to an allow list, and make it work each time.

It is so frustrating to go through a 15 message length thread in our forum or ticket system, with possible 2 or 3 administrators trying to help, only to find the customer say “I uninstalled my xx_brand firewall, and it worked right away.”

My suggestion is aways to know how to use your computer and related security applications, and use caution on what you decide to install.

I am a strong advocate of NOD32, which is a very good virus scanner, and it is easily configurable. But that is not to say that some others are good also… and I am sure there are some other very good ones.

So get to know your security tool, become friends with it, and the both of you can work as a team to keep you protected. But putting yourself behind a firewall that is poorly designed or not understood could put you more than behind a wall… it could put you into a corner!

Hi,

Using this blog, I can finally sound off about stuff and make it unofficial! It is hard to try to contain one’s self sometimes, and I wish I could say things publicly that I could not always do in my line of work. Doing it here in my personal blog will give me better freedom to post my thoughts on things that may not be ready for becoming official Flight1 content.

As some of you may or may not know, I am the president of Flight One Software, and there are many hats I have to put on during the day… from web and ecommerce technology, product testing, customer service, and many other things.

One of my biggest gripes are all the “hoops” that we have to go through to “try” to make software compatible on the 1000’s of different operating systems out there. We have the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. And out of the box, Vista installs itself with huge restrictions on parts of the computer (not really a bad thing in some ways), but they do not give users an easy installation option that provides the user easy system access out of the box. And then there are all the security products on top of that with over-designed or poorly thought out features that so often causes interference. And finally, you have the customers who do not understand all this and it escelates into long support tickets costing both development time and money, customer frustration, as well as lost time for the customer to enjoy their computer.

You say 1000’s of operating systems? Isn’t there just Vista and XP now? Well not really. With XP there were maybe 10’s. But with Vista, there are 1000’s? Why? Because no Vista is a vanilla Vista. So much has been altered from one installation to another. So to say “Vista compatible”, we should really say instead:

“Vista is compatible with many products as long as you install Vista on a freshly formatted system and not as a Windows XP upgrade,  and you do not install any overly aggressive or unnecessary security addins, and you setup Vista with proper permissions and have User Account Control disabled, and you understand completely how to use and configure Vista.”

So, if the above was said, then I would say that we would be 99.9% compatible with every Vista installation.

But the public may not fully see or understand what customer service folks have to go through. Do I say that Vista itself has some poorly designed and not fully thought out features? I would say yes and yes.

Do I say that end users indiscriminately install security related programs without fully knowing what they do? Yes!

Do customers try to blame us for the condition of their computers? Yes again.

So the bottom line is that it is just frustrating in the current computer environment. We are always trying to find ways to make things easier for everyone. Just please try to understand that it is not our fault if we can’t always have easy installations on your system. To make it easier for us, get to know Vista and how to fully control it… do not install this or that security product because it is free, or just because you saw a 5 star rating on it. Install the security product that gives you full control of what you want it to do. That will make it easier for everyone!

Thank you for reading!