I am Not a Geek has posted a preview on Windows XP SP2 RC2
The most talked about part of this service pack is of course the Security center and the much improved firewall. Anytime a new program tries to access the internet an alert message will pop up and ask you if you'd like to prevent this program from accessing the internet. Something I noticed is it doesn't stop the program at all! Behind this alert message my entire contact list was loaded in Trillian! This was before I gave it a selection to allow this program to run. As good as it is to have the capabilities of blocking programs from accessing the net it's rather stupid that they can access it until you say that the program cannot. Not only this, but I even told Windows FW to block this program and it STILL connected and I was able to send and receive messages just fine even while Windows FW was supposed to be blocking this! Microsoft really needs to redo this before the release is finalized. It's insane that this was allowed to happen this late in the development stage.Read more
