you are the media you consume.
ZoneAlarm phones home, Apple throws Intel a bone | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-01-13 | By Robert X. Cringely®
A Perfect Spy? It seems that ZoneAlarm Security Suite has been phoning home, even when told not to. Last fall, InfoWorld Senior Contributing Editor James Borck discovered ZA 6.0 was surreptitiously sending encrypted data back to four different servers, despite disabling all of the suite's communications options. Zone Labs denied the flaw for nearly two months, then eventually chalked it up to a "bug" in the software -- even though instructions to contact the servers were set out in the program's XML code.
(personally I rely on the firewall built into my wireless router, it's as good as anything you'll find on windows, and if they're going to crack that then they'llblow through anything that your windows desktop can support Windows free softwares only successfull function is the upgrade advertising it bombards you with). Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
I think the lesson here is that unless you know how to analyze internet traffic, you're at high risk for having your computer security compromised.
I'll have to check out the latest and greatest, I guess.
