Vista's firewall to be half open

Microsoft will release Vista with its firewall set to not block outgoing connections.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Vista_firewall_shackled_due_to_customer_demand_Microsoft/0,2000061744,39252954,00.htm

It has the ability to act like a true firewall, but Microsoft hasn't learned from past mistakes to turn on security features by default, yet.

Like I said, can't trust Microsoft. After the fiasco of Blaster and Sasser, you would think that Microsoft would finally be concerned with security first.

The positive way to look at this is that the firewall is half closed!

I think "half" closed is being optimistic. Screw Microsoft.

It is bad that they still don't know that security should be above whatever else.

I doubt they are even capable of adding good security. Windows' hiostory up to wMe in short form: added more and more rudimentary layers onto the (pirated?) DOS operating system. for Windows NT: employed a bunch of excellent VMS OS designers, let them create a nice system core and add a lot of old bloated DOS/WIndows code to it for backwards compatibility. XP: take NT and add more backwards compatibility bloat.

Noone has enough resources to clean that up and make money at the same time.

If Microsoft had some balls to strip off legacy code, the OS would be so much better.

Interested way to look at the issue... it doesn't change anything, though. Speculation that they can make a good product.

backwards compatibility is a good thing... Microsoft went the wrong way: bloating. Apple went the right way: emulation, as in Classic mode, Rosetta...
Microsoft haven't made a good product by the standard of the age since Windows NT 3.5 (well, I might be exadurating)

Windows 2000 is still the only MS OS I personally use.