VirtualLarry
Premium
join:2003-08-01
| reply to IGGY
Re: iggy's prior post explains some of this
said by IGGY  :"But the first thing ZA does without asking is contact ZoneLabs for one or more of various reasons" This action would of course be blocked when set to be blocked. I have no such contact with the company when using their product. Just a minor note here. I have no idea how it behaves in the 5.x Free versions, but in the prior 3.x versions, attempting to "block" ZA from phoning-home, using the firewall's own controls, was ineffective. It had an internal "allow" rule to bypass any user rules. If ZA Free 5.x is phoning home again, then I also have no doubt that they would also use a similar inbuilt "allow" bypass rule.
I don't know if I have it saved, but I had a really good discussion about this whole issue when it first broke out with one of ZL's official free-support people on GRC's newsgroups. They confirmed the behavior, and that it was intentional, for marketing reasons. Think about it, it tells them how many people, worldwide, happen to be use the "free" version of their software, and allows them a marketing opportunity to "upsell" them to the paid version. There was also some comment about auto-upgrade patches being detected, in case there is a flaw in the software, but that doesn't explain why the software generated a unique user-id, nor why it didn't give the users of the free version the opportunity to opt-out of it.
said by IGGY :Now if users aren't seeing the option screen I captured during the install. That leads me to have to send an email and start asking some questions. Which I'll do when I get time later tonight. I'm not ready to call out the wolves just yet. Well, knowing that they've done it before, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to see them trying it again.
It really calls into the question of whether or not you can trust the vendor of your security software, when their software intentionally undermines the ability of the user to specify security policy. I am, in fact, no longer a ZoneAlarm user directly because of that, and because of recurring technical flaws in their software. |
