Vista to handcuff firewall

Microsoft plans to turn off half the firewall in Windows Vista when the new operating system ships later this year because it doesn't think most users need all the firewall's functionality or can handle its management.

Although Vista's firewall will ship with both in- and outbound filtering capabilities, the latter will be disabled by default. Corporate users, however, can turn on outbound if they wish.

“Inbound filtering is on by default and outbound filtering for applications is configurable by enterprise administrators through Group Policy,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. Microsoft has been promoting Vista's firewall as better than XP's because it's able to stop both incoming attacks and filter outbound traffic.

But with it enabled only for incoming data, the end result is a defence identical to Windows XP SP2, which has an incoming-only firewall that's automatically enabled.