Here's mine.


ZoneAlarm version:5.5.062.011
TrueVector version:5.5.062.011
Driver version:5.5.062.011

Does this have to do with the whole "sonypictures.hitbox.com" tracking cookie?

filmy? Maybe, I don't know. All I know is that I want to know if people, like myself who IS getting access issues to SONY forums, and only Sony Forums, have the later or earlier version of ZAP.

From the few who HAVE responded it would appear it makes NO difference.

Mind you, these would be the people who CAN get onto the site to respond! HAH!

I can only get here now, by going FORWARDS<>BACKWARDS - this tends to get me in - and accelerate the arthritis in my fingers!

Grazie

I had no problems with ZA 5.5 but when I upgraded to ZA 6.0 I started having the problem. I manually added www.sonymediasoftware.com to my site list and enabled 3rd party cookies and now I can get to MOST pages normally. There still is times when I have to do the FORWARD/BACKWARD dance but it is much less often. I posted about this on the ZoneAlarm forums today and so far one person answered that people who have upgraded in-place are having problems while people who installed new do not. Doesn’t really help me much, but it’s more info on the problem.

Here is the link to my post in the Access Issues section of the ZoneLabs forums in case you want to follow it or add anything so ZA knows a lot of customers are effected:

Major website access problem with ZoneAlarm 6.0 upgrade

~jr

Thanks JR! - Anybody else?

Grazie

All i can say is that nothing from hitbox.com comes down my line into my network or my PC. I see no sites or ads or anything from them and i certainly get no cookies from them.

That being said, i have zero trouble accessing this site.

Maybe you've got some network problems in your neck of the globe that slow down your communication with hitbox.com and make the pages stall while waiting for their stuff. In fact, that's the main reason i blocked them. At one point it was taking several minutes for these pages to load and i found the culprit was hitbox.com's slow response. After i blocked them, these forum pages started loading in mere seconds rather than minutes. While i assume this speed (or lack thereof) problem is probably rare and only hits small sections of the 'net at any given time, it does still affect some people badly.

It seems to me that having ZoneAlarm block them entirely could only help. But then again, i don't know exactly what ZoneAlarm does when it blocks. If it merely prevents you from getting information back from a site, it might still slow you down while that site is being accessed for information you'll end up not receiving. *shrug* I dunno. I stopped using ZoneAlarm years ago because it was a resource hog and it itself was slowing my computer down far more than any malicious outsiders were. I also studied the logs from it over a 6 month period and discovered that the only things it blocked were completely harmless anyway. Never once did it report blocking anything that would have been harmful. *shrug again*

> I stopped using ZoneAlarm years ago because it was a resource hog and it itself was slowing my computer down far more than any malicious outsiders were. I also studied the logs from it over a 6 month period and discovered that the only things it blocked were completely harmless anyway. Never once did it report blocking anything that would have been harmful. *shrug again*

So Kelly, what do you use? (send me a private email if you don’t want to reveal it here). My ZoneAlarm subscription is up soon and I wouldn’t mind using something that is a bit more light weight.

~jr

I've got a LinkSys router/switch/firewall that i put between my internal LAN and the cable/dsl modem. This can potentially block everything in the outside world from seeing that your PC even exists! Any malicious attacks (or even non-malicious ones, for that matter) coming in from the outside see only the firewall, which rejects almost everything. The only stuff that gets through is responses that my PC has requested (such as browsing a web page or connecting to an instant messenger).

This device in itself doesn't block me from accessing anything though. It only keeps the outside world at bay. My other defense is that i run my own DNS servers. This is probably quite a bit beyond what most folks are willing/capable of doing, but for some of you it might be a benefit. I tell my own LAN that i am the authority on which servers host various domains. I list the ones i want to block and give them the IP address 127.0.0.2, which means "it doesn't exist so don't even bother trying to access it". Anything not in my list is looked up at my ISP's name servers and the real address is returned.

If you don't have the abilility or desire to do this, you can still approximate it after a fashion. There is a file under the C:\windows directory named hosts (if it's not there, create it with any text editor). You can list any host/domain names you wish, one per line, followed by a space or a tab, and then 127.0.0.2. For example:

hitbox.com     127.0.0.2
www.pornsite.com     127.0.0.2
adserver.com     127.0.0.2
popups.adserver.com     127.0.0.2

You'll have to add all hosts separately. Just listing adserver.com doesn't block www.adserver.com and popups.adserver.com, so those must be added as well. The next time you restart your computer, any attempts to access the sites in that list will simply fail nearly instantly and return nothing.

I'm still back with the freeware version of ZA 3.7.098.

About a year ago I started getting frustrated with ZA when my system tray monitors showed that ZA was eating up nearly 100% of my CPU time. I later discovered that some critter in my system was trying to phone home, and ZA was spending all of its time blocking it from getting to the Internet--in other words, ZA was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing. The critter in my system kept spinning off new attackers every few weeks that resided in my Windows/System32 folder and those new executables couldn't be deleted until I booted into DOS and did it the old-fashioned way. What a pain, but you have to admire the creativity of the malware writer.

Finally I must have deleted the mother critter, since my system has been fine for the past 6 months. By itself, ZA takes next to no resources--at least that's true for the old version I'm using.