I haven't thought of ports in a long time and I was just fine. But as always, once I do start thinking about them, I start to worry. So I tinkered with the firewall advanced settings again and fell down the rabbit hole...
Then, remembering the many things on my to do list, I decided to cut the nonsense and reset the firewall to its default settings. I read that ingoing it blocks basically everything.
So I did that. And I saw some things that were open that I didn't like, and I closed them too. So now all outgoing traffic appears to be disabled, but guess what? In the CurrPorts utility I'm running, all the listening on various ports is merrily continuing.
(I'm starting to get the creeping impression that the settings you can supposedly adjust in firewall are like that button pedestrians can push at a red light so that the Walk sign comes on quickly for them. In other words, pure illusion. We are get the impression that we control something, but it really makes no difference. Am I too cynical about this?)
Then, remembering the many things on my to do list, I decided to cut the nonsense and reset the firewall to its default settings. I read that ingoing it blocks basically everything.
So I did that. And I saw some things that were open that I didn't like, and I closed them too. So now all outgoing traffic appears to be disabled, but guess what? In the CurrPorts utility I'm running, all the listening on various ports is merrily continuing.
(I'm starting to get the creeping impression that the settings you can supposedly adjust in firewall are like that button pedestrians can push at a red light so that the Walk sign comes on quickly for them. In other words, pure illusion. We are get the impression that we control something, but it really makes no difference. Am I too cynical about this?)
My Computer
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- OS
- Win7, 64 bit, home premium