subject firewall

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I'll add this caveat to hardware and software firewalls. The term firewall was, and in many cases with 20 odd year experience IP folks, is an appliance. A piece of hardware. On the other hand is software, which in the not so distant past was considered "just" a "filter". Not a firewall. Marketing people, in their infinite wisdom, realized that the masses wouldn't have a clue of the distinction between a firewall and a port filter and they realized it was a heck of a lot simplier to use firewall to provide the masses a way to understand what the port filtering software does. So the line between an appliance firewall and a software port filter became so blurred that today the term firewall means either one.