In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
Online gaming will be a big area of support, but there are plenty of other
applications that look like end-user client applications but which wind up
hosting at least one "server" port.

I doubt gaming will be a big area of support - all the games I play
online work through my hardware firewall without the need to open any
ports. If you want to run a game _server_ it will affect you, but most
Internet game servers are on co-located boxes because of the bandwidth
requirements. It will affect LAN parties, but since LAN parties tend to
be hosted by geeks anyway, it won't really be a problem.

There are very few end user applications that need to listen on a port.

By blaming Microsoft only, you are starting to sound like those rabid
anti-Microsoft people CJ was talking about. Microsoft had genuine economic
motivation to make their operating system easier for dumb people to get
working and it's unreasonable to lay all (or even most) of the blame at
their feet for catering to their audience.

I'm not blaming them for catering to their audience, they could have
easily done that without leaving so many services the vast majority of
users don't use open and vulnerable to attack without lessening the
usability of the system. Windows XP Home Edition, out of the box, is
like a poorly-configured *server* and it's supposed to be a home user's
OS.
It's not just Microsoft, it's the PC manufacturers. It often takes them
forever to pre-patch their default load of Windows with the security
updates Microsoft puts out. It wouldn't surprise me if PCs are still
shipping without Service Pack 1. Machines we recently got had SP1 but no
critical patches, which have been out for quite some time.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
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"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"