Is BlackIce a poor personal firewall?

[Keefe]

Don't have much experience with it but have heard rumors that BlackIce is inherently insecure as a personal firewall.

Some security consulting firm just told me that blackice rocks (mainly because they bought them) and I'm having my doubts.

Can anybody who is in the know enlighten me on BlackIce's reputation?

I personally have used Zone Alarm and absolutely loved it. Everytime an application askes to use a port to the outside world Zone alarm asks you if it can.  Everything is able to be changed later on like if you remove a possible spy ware based program but suspect it may still linger on in your system just revoke it's privledges.  It's free for personal use and I've got no complaints about it.http://grc.com/ actually recommends it and has a few not so nice things to say about black ice.  Besides Zone Alarm is free.  Gibson researce (above link) also has some cool apps to help test your system to see how secure it is.  My computer passed all the tests with an old copy of Zone Alarm (it's free), but according to him Black ice failed some of the other tests he has ran in the past.  Never tried it before but that's my knowledge of the subject.  By the way did I mention Zone alarm is Freehttp://www.zonelabs.com. Try it ya might like it.

Savage is right Zone Alarm is a very good firewall.  I have the Pro version but it doesn't seem any better than the free version.  I also run Blackice on the same machine.  Blackice tends to give a little more info about port, finger print, etc. scans.  I have never had any conflicts running them both on the same unit.  Although I have never tried it I have heard good things about Tiny and it is free for personal use.

BlackIce is pretty good for personal use but as I've read in a couple of articles it doesn't protect your system in certain instances.  You might want to read the article on dDOS attacks on that GRC.com went through.  Basically, when the creator of GRC.com wanted to investigate how the zombies worked he found out that BlackIce didn't even work against them.  I would recommend ZoneAlarm over BlackIce if security is your concern.