M$ only gets the beating that they deserve. First let's look at your own post.
You said "... the SP2 firewall isn't all that bad and is certainly far better that what most home users had previously ...". The firewall isn't all that bad, which is NOT to say that it's good. It's like saying that solid crap is better than liquid crap. Guess what?! It's still crap! Did you read the article from the original post ( I just got this today from HAL9000 )?
You said "Those of us who know better, do better." Well that's certainly true. Those of us who really know everything don't use M$ at all and do better than anyone that does use M$.
You said "Zone Alarm for me." I agree that Zone Alarm is good, if you know what you're doing. What is the average person going to do when Zone Alarm asks if xyz.exe can access the Internet? They'll probably click on the 'Allow' button, so their new virus can now access the Internet. Yay! The default settings for all of the firewalls for M$ that I've used are too permissive. I've spent hours clamping down on Norton Firewall, McAfee Firewall, Zone Alarm, and others.
Now on to new business. M$ is crap by design. Here are a couple of examples.
First example: I've spent a lot of time trying to tighten security in M$ operating systems. In one experiment I saw that the network services that were turned on included the RPC service. RPC stands for remote procedure call. It is a regular TCP/IP service available with many TCP/IP stacks. The purpose of RPC is to allow a remote machine to run software on your local machine. Generally you do not want this to be available. So I turned the RPC service off. HAH!!! Suddenly I was unable to drag-and-drop-copy and drag-and-drop-move files using Windows Explorer. So I tried to turn the RPC service back on. Couldn't do it. I finally had to use a rescue procedure to make the system work properly again, with RPC enabled! So the geniuses at M$ have created the OS to use the network service that allows remote users to run software on your machine in order to do things that are entirely local, such as copying and moving files using Windows Explorer. If you don't see anything wrong with that then you are in the wrong business. It's an obvious security hole.
Next example: I was installing M$ OS on my home computer that is connected to the Internet via a cable modem. Just as the installation was finishing I got a Windows Messenger box pop up. Somone on the Internet had used Windows Messenger to access my machine within minutes of installing the operating system. Naturally there is a work around, which I did. I unplugged the Internet connection and reinstalled the OS from scratch, including formatting the partitions. The fact that there is a work around does not change the fact that it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
I included these examples because I haven't seen anyone explicitly mention them in TR before now. There are multitudes of problems with the design of M$ software. The OSes and the applications have all got vulnerabilities deliberately designed into them. Things like MS Office macros were created when some brainless software designer decided that it would be nice if users could do this or that and didn't consider, or didn't care, that the feature could be exploited by malicous people. You'll probably say that there are work arounds for most or all of these things. Usually the work around means turning the 'feature' off. That's not the point. The point is that these security holes should have never been implemented in the first place.
So if you get tired of seeing people bashing M$ try to remember that it is only because BG and M$ deserve everything that is said about them.
