Bye Sygate, Hello Comodo

Ok, if you have read my previous post on the failings of the Zone Alarm firewall, you may have read my recommendation of Sygate. Well, things have changed.

If you visit the Sygate website, you are greeted by the news that Symantec have acquired Sygate, and therefore it is no more. Therefore any problems or security issues with the current version will remain. So i have had to find a replacement.

Comodo Personal Firewall is a free-for-life firewall that, according to reviews and reports, is comparable to paid firewalls such as ZA Pro. PC Magazine give it 4.5 out of 5 and a glowing review, testing it against four different types of attack and confirming it survived all (the only other firewall that passed was ZA Pro). But people have criticised Comodo for requiring a key code only available by registering an e-mail address. Why do you need a key code if the product is free to all? Are you just after our e-mail addresses? Well, maybe not. A sensible reason was posted in the PC Mag review forum by Comodo CEO, Melih:

“Comodo makes money selling Digital Certificates to businesses (we are the guys who enable the yellow padlock you see when you visit sites etc). We decided to build our Brand, Comodo, to be a household name. We don’t have $500Million sitting in the bank account (hold on…..let me check with my CFO….. 2 min later….Ok confirmed we don’t! 🙂 ) for us to run a huge advertising campaign. Comodo is full of techies who are damn good at what they do. So we decided, why not give to everyone desktop security products for free! If we are able to write good software and give such valuable software for free, our name will be known in the market place, we will build our Comodo brand and it will be associated with security. And this will help us sell more Digital Certificates and other services we have as we will have a big brand!

All we want from our users is their trust! of course, we understand that we have to earn it! That we are doing by building for our users unmatched Desktop security products so that they will never have to worry about

1)Which security product they should buy

2)Where they should buy it from

3)How much they should pay for it.

Because we will provide them All the security products they need, for free! By doing that, we are hoping that we will gain our user’s trust so that we can be a big brand and this will help our other services we sell to enterprises! Also if we can achieve our goals, it will mean people who could not otherwise have access to security technologies, can now have it for free. This will help the fight against spyware/trojans that convert PCs into zombies and help the virtual criminal underworld. Afterall its not the PCs in large enterprises that are zombies but its the ones at people’s home who cannot afford (or not prepared) to pay for these type of products. And in return this will lead to creating a more trusted ecosystem for all of us to interact with on the Internet! So its a win-win for the end users and Comodo!

…We want to measure the success of the product. Just like Skype knows how many installation, active users they have, Comodo wants to know how many installations of our product there are and how many active users using our products! The way we have chosen to achieve that, due to our background as Digital Certificate Authority, is by using Digital Certificates. So we send you a license key, which corresponds to a digital certificate and the status of the digital certificate is checked (eg: whether its still active, revoked etc) when you enter these details!”

So, thats that query cleared up. So what do we have?

• As easy to use as Zone Alarm and
• As protective and smart as Zone Alarm Pro.

But there is one difference between the two, of course, the price. Comodo is free. Download it and register for your free key code here, or from Major Geeks here.

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