Marcus appears to have writ:
[snip]
> The brief on Microsoft's page is completely content-free.
> Several times, Catapult is recommended as the solution because
> it's secure. Nothing about why it's secure or how it's secure.
> Don't bother your head with that stuff! It's SECURE, OK?
>
> ...Or at least as secure as a beta product that only
> runs on a beta version of NT can be.
>
> In fairness to Microsoft, it may be pretty good stuff.
> But we can't tell from what they say. Which is why I feel it
> marks a milestone in the firewall market. The Big Boys Are Here
> now and it's SECURE, it's OK. That argument worked for Netscape,
> for a while.
>
> Those of us who've been with this firewall thing for
> a while have seen the market get muddied before, and eventually
> things calm down again. It'll be fascinating to see what
> happens if Microsoft decides to put even a teeny bit of their
> marketing muscle behind Catapult. I guess it means that, as
> a technology, firewalls have "arrived."
"To question all things; never to turn away from any difficulty; to
accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people without
a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism; letting no fallacy, or incoherence
or confusion of thought, step by unperceived; ...these are the lessions
we learn from the ancient dialecticians." First time I saw that, I
though Marcus had written it, but it's from John Stuart Mill.
While I don't agree that the Microsoft fluff represents a new trend
(a certain _major_ router manufacturer has for some time touted their
firewalling stuff with slides like "Unix: Wrong Choice for Firewalls"
with no credible evidence that their product is better, only less well
understood by the black hats), they may be the first fluffers on this
scale in the firewalls market with the clout and credibility to pull it
off.
Hmm, now that I look at it again, I guess Marcus' point is that
the weighing in of a gorilla like Microsoft is a signal event of
firewalls' arrival as a technology. I shudder to agree.
--
W.C. Epperson "I have great faith in fools.
Senior SE Self-confidence, my friends call it."
Information Security Officer --Edgar Allan Poe--
DBA Emeritus
Curmudgeon-for-Life
Virginia Dept. of Education
epperson @
pen .
k12 .
va .
us
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