Zone Alarm going nuts

[SARGE]

Installed it last night on both pc's. My boys' pc crashes regularly and often won't load Win98. This has resulted in several reformats to fix, etc. They play alot of online games (which I suspect) and my 14 year old told me how he could use an open port scanner and screw up others' pc. He claims never to have done it, he just knows how. He assured me Janet Reno won't be knocking.

This said, after loading ZA, I started visiting some sites and I got constant popups from ZA about how it is blocking pings, many from AOL. My question is - what in the world is going on? Boys claim it's just cookies being sent - I negated that argument. I can see ZA doing its job, just curious what is going on. BTW, we don't use AOL or its messenger.

[Kubie]

It's doing it's job, Sarge. I use to let ZA log the hits but the file just gets huge. And quick too. I disabled the pop-up warning because it started to get tiresome. You will get hits even from your own ISP, but most from ad companys wanting to know what you're buying or what interests you.
Carl

[SARGE]

I'm new at this firewall stuff, so bear with me. The purpose of ZA is to block access to your pc, right? So why would the ad companies, etc., need access to my pc? I understand the cookie concept, but ZA doesn't block cookies, right? I'm back to original question - why all these hits from different IP's from AOHell?

[Charliey]

Basically, ZA stops all packets that arent explicitly expected by running programs.

Since your son has been on some hacking sites, to find out how to do the port scanning, his ip number may have been put on to hackers scanning lists, and thats why theres so many pings.

Another thing i found, is if you have it set to aleart you about incoming pings, and if you are running napster, you will get MANY messages, b/c ppl ping you when ever they search for one of your songs, to find out your response time.

[SARGE]

We get a different IP address with each logon. We don't use Napster.

[glc]

ICQ uses AOL servers too.