Windows Vista's Firewall offers false sense of security

To turn the Lenovo Registration applet into one of the "excepted" applications, we checked it on the exceptions list. At this point, we realized that, by adding a new application and checking it, we didn't learn anything different than we did when inspecting the properties of the one that was already checked (Core Networking). So, we decided to install another application (Firefox) -- one that was easy to tell if there was any outbound blocking going on --- to see what would happen.

For David Berlind's write-up on Vista's inadequate personal firewall, see his blog post in ZDNet's TestBed blog.