<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Western Airlines:
Firewalls are good for cable modem type connections, but MY friendly company computer geek says they're unnecessary for dial-ups.</font>
I respectufully disagree here. Imagine this scenario. A virus (let say a new variant of Kletz) or a trojan horse makes it past the anti-virus software (which hopefully is running at your computer). The moment it wants to connect to the Internet (to use its own SMTP server to send itself out - case of Kletz - or to join irc channel to listen for commands from a hacker - case of trojan horse) a good personal firewall will pop up a dialog box asking you, the user "Do you want this new application to connect to the Internet?"
At this moment you know your computer is infected and can take an action. Without a firewall, you would have no clue, and be browsing the Net thinking everything is fine with your computer.
[This message has been edited by Jano (edited 07-10-2003).]