Online Armor sold to Emsisoft

http://onlinearmorpersonalfirewall.blogspot.com/2010/06/online-armor-sold-to-emsisoft.html

The deal is done, there's no going back and no regrets. Indeed, Emsisoft aquiring Online Armor is the best possible thing that could happen to it. Emsisoft has 20 staff focused on security software. Tall Emu had two (OA developers) - and they just went to work for Emsisoft.

The big question is whether the two OA developers went to work for Emsisoft before or after Mike sold out Online Armor.

Yeah,on that question hangs the story!!

But from a practical standpoint, I never could get with OnlineArmour because of the dramatic increase in boot-time,and A-Squared had slow updates,and mucho false positives.

The EMSISOFT+TALLEMU marriage will give us....Son Of BitDefender!!

decent protection at a resource price you can beat down the street.

noor

noorismail wrote:But from a practical standpoint, I never could get with OnlineArmour because of the dramatic increase in boot-time,and A-Squared had slow updates,and mucho false positives.

Agreed - the boot-time was never addressed and it never improved (I think it's only for Windows XP but I could be wrong). I used OA for about one whole year before changing to Comodo and enjoyed the much faster boot-time. The system generally also felt lighter.

Regardless, it was/is a decent piece of software, but I'm done with classical HIPS and firewalls with outbound control - I simply don't see any point. In my opinion, the classical HIPS (when not configured as a default-deny anti-executable) decreases security because it gives you the option to allow potentially dangerous processes. And when you come to realise that all you need is a default-deny anti-execution mechanism, you'll look to other much simpler and resource-preserving ways (I discovered and used SRP around September 2009, and I've never looked back since). As for outbound control, the majority of those that use third party software firewalls to "control outbound" traffic pretty much allow all their trusted programs outbound access anyway. And when you deny (foreign) execution by default, no malware can even run to send information out in the first place. So you can see why I no longer use a software firewall with outbound control.

Windows Firewall (even Windows XP's) has probably the best inbound filtering of them all, so why look for other firewalls? Also, most of us are behind NAT Routers anyway.