Nice little summary of WinXP SP2 over at OSNews. It seems MS has a new firewall in this release. What interests me is this screen shot. A simple UI for allowing incoming traffic to listening processes is a great idea. However, I doubt a pop-up window is the best way to handle this. I would guess a lot of users will just hit the OK to make the pop-up window go away. A application that had a list of listening programs and allowed the user to select which ones could receive non-local packets would probably be better. A couple of years ago I started working on something like this for Linux. Unfortunately, like a lot of the play projects I start it didn’t get finished. At least I seem to have had a good idea.