XP Phone Home!

[Checkout]

This has probably been raised before, but for new XP users, here's a little trauma:

{QUOTE-> When you do a search on your computer for files and folders under Windows XP it contacts sa.windows.com (207.46.226.40) on port 80. This behaviour seems to be a backdoor channel using the front door. I cannot find any documentation on this "feature". <-QUOTE}

{QUOTE-> How can I stop it from doing this?

There is a switch to accomplish this. Right-click on My Computer and choose Properties/Automatic Updates and choose "Turn off automatic updating...". Then click on apply and OK. <-QUOTE}

[UNICRON]

MS OSs are well documented phoning home. You firewall should be able to block the obvious ones.

The ones that don't play by the rules require an external firewall/filter. IPchains is a rulesbased firewall that you can configure on an old box running linux to catch EVERYTHING.

[Detox]

Ive heard of that... can that stuff be ran on an old 100 mgtz pentium with like 8 megs of RAM? I have one in the garage...

[UNICRON]

you bet!

a good distribution for old slow computers is slackware found at www.slackware.org


it is time for us all to learnhow to use other OSs instead of always MS.