On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Philip J. Plourde wrote:

> Hasn't Adobe been doing something like this for years with Photoshop?

I've heard that too.  Personally, I don't like anything thats not
explicitly internet related to be talking online.  Office, Acrobat and
Window Help all seem to survive fine offline.

> A decent personal firewall with per application authorization can be a
> little annoying to run, but it does cut down on those little "unknown"
> conversations going on.   There are several available, and I personally
> recommend Tiny Personal Firewall from tinysoftware.com if you are in the
> mood to see what's going on.
>

Tiny is free, and as full featured as anything else I've used.
Another free firewall, Outpost

http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpost/

is supposed to be nice.  They have a product comparison matrix at

http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpost/compare.html

which sadly does not include TinyFirewall.