[PCTECH] How to stop "phone-home" activity?

["Dan Bale" <dbale@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks everyone!

I feel so much better about my router/firewall setup now!

But I'd still like to address "phone-home" activities.  I tell the family
units that use the home PC to behave while online and, while I believe their
intentions are always good, the boys tend to find sites related to Game Boys
and Playstation and Pokemon and Digimon that throw back a lot of junk.
Before the HW firewall was added, one of these sites became the
non-benevolent dictator of our browser's home page -- even after we changed
the settings, it didn't stick.  (I think SpyBot S&D finally got rid of it.)

For this reason, I still have my guard up, even though you guys have
convinced me about the HW firewall capabilities.

Since I do a lot of financial activity online, I try to be extremely
cautious.  Surprisingly, one of the web sites I visit a lot allows logging
in from an unsecure page.  While not directly financial-related in nature,
it gets into personal info that I'd prefer to treat just as I would my
financial matters.  (I get to a secured login page by entering in a bogus ID
& PW on the unsecured one.)  My current bank requires a login ID of my
social security number, which drives me bonkers!

So, one of the features that I was thinking a software firewall would offer
is the ability to monitor all outbound traffic.  And stop & interrogate the
traffic that I didn't recognize as something I initiated.

Jim Franz mentioned "I use Zone Alarm Pro and have no problem w/Live Update.
But I set it to where I have to approve every connection."  Doesn't this get
to be time-consuming?  And how easy/difficult is it to identify the
application that is sending and/or the data that is sent?

John Jones mentions that his software firewall "detects when an
application's EXE
file has changed and forces me to re-authorize it for 'net access."  Might I
ask which firewall app does this?

The other consideration I have is performance.  This is a 233MHz CPU with
128MB of RAM, running Win98SE.

BTW, the reason I don't completely trust detectors for keyloggers and their
ilk is that they only recognize them by known signatures.  If there was a
way to trap the behavior of keyloggers in general, I'd be interested.

tia,
db