Vista's firewall is not

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But, with Windows Vista's firewall, it works the other way around. All outbound communications are allowed permanently until a rule has been created to explicitly block it. Despite Vamosi having routinely voiced his concerns about Vista's firewall before Vista shipped, Microsoft moved forward with what he believes to be a "half-cocked" design anyway. According to Vamosi, Microsoft's explanation for its decision has been that having to walk through the many wizard-driven pop-ups that would occur shortly after the first time Vista gets installed would be a poor out-of-the-box experience and that users would become de-sensitized to the prompts. Vamosi disagrees and so do I. Offering an outbound-blocking that, out-of-the-box blocks nothing until an end-user or network administrator takes explicit and deliberate steps to block it.

But it gets worse.