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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

Necessary tools:

    Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 or 2022
    Wix v3.14 Toolset
    Visual Studio extension for Wix v3 Toolset

To build the application... (You get the idea.)

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I don’t see what the issue is with the dev tools used. VS is nice as it has always been. Wix is very convenient and makes building msi ez. But I wonder why the dev thought a 3rd party Windows fw was necessary.

> But I wonder why the dev thought a 3rd party Windows fw was necessary

Because windows' built-in firewall is of static nature, and as such, useless in the personal firewall role.

What does "static nature" mean, in your parlance?

I am assuming they're referring to TinyWall's "allowlist this process" or time-based rule capabilities. Windows Defender firewall can allowlist applications, but you have to feed it a path to the executable image.

Such things have been around for ages - I remember getting a free license somehow for a host-based IDS back in the Windows Vista times (struggled to look it up but I believe it was SAX2 by Ax3soft). It had some interesting features but running on an underpowered laptop the overhead cost more frustration than it was worth.

Windows Firewall, similar to IPtables, can only be set to on or off per rule. Yes, you can configure it however you like, but it has zero interaction with the user while it's running (except for a simple on/off checkbox on first socket listen occurrence).

In contrast, traditional third-party firewall programs for Windows were always fully interactive and would offer much finer control in that way. Something we would call a personal firewall. A personal firewall would allow users to inspect and control each and every network interaction (not just LISTEN).

Ever since I found a folder on my drive titled "xxx was here", back in 1999, on windows, I've been using a personal firewall. Changed many over the years, and now running Fort.

https://github.com/tnodir/fort

I remember using comodo at one time. Is fort the best you've had throughout the years? I've been searching for a robust in-host firewall for an ancient win2k8 server I cannot shutdown. I remember comodo had a verbose setting which told you what was being being blocked when it was being blocked. Was very helpful in troubleshooting.

Comodo was great until I've discovered it is using file system's altstreams to hash the files which resulted in sync programs constantly re-syncing all files. Naturally, when I start a backup/sync program, I expect only the last added/changed 1% to be transferred. With Comodo firewall installed, this wasn't the case. After digging for a way to disable that, I had to uninstall it.

Fort is my current number one, for sure.

Windows Firewall Control is good, binisoft iirc.

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