Astaro Corporation, a leading network security vendor, recently announced the launch of the Essential Firewall edition of its flagship security solution Astaro Security Gateway (ASG), available for free to all organizations worldwide. The Essential Firewall edition is claimed to include all the necessary functionality that all organizations need to secure their networks and operate a successful business, but we found some limitations.

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I am now convinced that computer software vendors, knowingly or otherwise, help perpetuate insecure computer practices. They do this by the ridiculous practice of pushing out updates through executable files which ninety-eight percent of the time will get blocked by the security software we encourage users to install on their systems. You get a notification that an update is available, and you click on the “update now” button and sit there and wait, and wait, and wait….

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Have you ever gone to a website to read an article and find yourself playing mouse pilot trying to avoid those pesky text-link ads, pop-ups, scrolling and flashing banners and other annoyances? Some websites are just horribly notorious for this kind of behavior. Some even hold you hostage for half a minute with ad pages the won’t go away unless you “click here to skip this ad”. I admit that the publishers of these websites have every right to generate revenue – that is how they are able to offer us free content, but come on!

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