Win XP SP2 RC out

[DGhost]

3Com supports the feature (and supposedly Intel was either going to or has, but I am unable to find any more particulars on that) with some of their network cards.

Outside of that, I do have to agree with Wombat on this. What purpose would it serve? it screws with a lot of the existing models for how things work in the networking world, and ties hardware independant functions to requiring a certain network card. not good karma.

the only place it really winds up working out is in a corporate network where you can lock down the network card so that it can only talk to things it is supposed to at a "hardware" level. buuttt... even that has its limits...

[Jon P. Inghram]

No external hardware required would be nice, although after checking Motorola's site I see they've got cable modems with a built-in firewall/router/802.11b combo now.

http://broadband.motorola.com/consumers/products/sbg1000/default.asp

[schmosef]

I was at a Microsoft security seminar a few months back. Steve Balmer gave the closing keynote speech. He said that Microsoft expected firewall technology to be a big focus of future industry R&D efforts. He talked about developing AI based firewalls that would be able to see and stop attempts to compromise undiscovered security holes and he talked about extending the firewall model to the OS and application level. He said Microsoft is trying to develop a robust and effective method for users to be able to install their own apps without having to grant them enough security privileges that they could compromise a PC. He also said that the current model of “one time approval” wasn’t good enough and he wanted tech in the OS to monitor application activity in real-time to see if it started doing things it shouldn’t. Don’t get too excited, he was talking about R&D initiatives, not tech they were trying to implement in Longhorn.

[mmp121]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
Anyone know if there's any reason why there are no NIC's with a built-in firewall?

Doesn't NVidia's new 250Gb chipset have a built in firewall for their onboard LAN ? I guess the only purpose it would serve is to not have to worry about a software (OS) based or separate device (router) based firewall.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Originally posted by mmp121
Doesn't NVidia's new 250Gb chipset have a built in firewall for their onboard LAN ? I guess the only purpose it would serve is to not have to worry about a software (OS) based or separate device (router) based firewall.

Yep, http://www.nvidia.com/page/nf3.html