The free firewall business has been suffering a bit recently. Sygate has been taken over by Symantec, which is the end of the Sygagte Personal firewall, and Kero said it was dropping its free firewall at the end of the year. Regular readers may remember I've been recommeding Sygate for some time, so I've been looking for a substitute. The Kerio Personal Firewall is the best I've found so far.
The good news comes from CNet:
Sunbelt Software, best known for its CounterSpy anti-spyware product, said on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire the Kerio Personal Firewall from Kerio Technologies, saving the popular consumer desktop firewall product from the chop. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Sunbelt will continue to offer a basic, free version of the firewall for home users and plans to announce reduced pricing for the full version of the product and a variety of special offers after it closes the deal, according to the statement.
CNet says Kerio has been downloaded "more than 2 million times," which is some sort of "popular" but it frightens me. There are more than 700 million Windows machines out there. Admittedly many are behind corporate firewalls, and many people must be using Norton, Zone Alarm etc, but there must still be a lot of undefended PCs on the net.
Kerio is quite sophisticated and does a good job of blocking adverts that are on pages, not just pop-up ads. It can filter cookies and also block JavaScript and ActiveX components -- and it's easier to vary these settings in the firewall than in the browser. Finally, you may well find it easier to use Kerio than Sygate: it's less geeky.
I also tried and quickly uninstalled the latest Zone Alarm (not free) suite: I accidentally blocked my own net access and couldn't figure out how to get it back. Reading the help files didn't help. It also failed to deal with a bit of adware that I knew I had. I've nothing against ZA in principle and I used the first firewall-only version for a long time. I've run into problems with later more complex versions, but it seems to work for a lot of people. On that basis, I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying it.
