Check Point has released a beta of yet another sandbox for your Internet browser. Called ZoneAlarm ForceField, the idea is simple: What happens in Firefox, stays in Firefox. Or Internet Explorer, for that matter.

Any downloads or collateral material you collect during your browsing experience is destroyed once you close the browser. If beta testing goes well, Check Point plans to release ZoneAlarm ForceField in the first quarter of 2008 as a retail product.

General Dynamics Canada and SCC have taken the security of mobile communications one step further by designing a military, battlefield ready firewall network and application firewall.

"Network-centric operations require data to be shared between brigades, coalitions and even civil authorities. Advanced application-layer firewalls successfully protect networks by monitoring data flow to ensure only authorized data is exchanged, and to detect and prevent intrusion attempts and viruses embedded in data flow," General Dynamics said.

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. today relesed  ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 7.1 for the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. ZoneAlarm Antivirus and the free ZoneAlarm firewall were also made available today for Vista.

Check Point's new ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 7.0 considerably got better than the 6.0 version released almost a year ago.

Core modules include antivirus, antispyware, and antiadware protection, thanks to the Kaspersky engine, as well as the well established CheckPoint network firewall and the OSFirewall, an additional layer of protection that detects and blocks suspicious changes (caused by malware) to key areas of the system.

How does a free software firewall compares to a commercial firewall solution ? In order to get some answers, O'Reilly SysAdmin team set up a benchmark test for Cisco PIX, SmoothWall and OpenBSD. The results are quite interesting.

Mobile companies such as telecom operators will be able to enforce local SMS regulations, codes of conduct and privacy policies by using the Regulatory SMS Firewall. The ground-breaking system optimizes both a correct compliance of business contracts for operators and transparency for end users in the (premium) SMS market.

To continue along its economic transformation path, China needs free access to information, which means abandoning some of the authoritarian state's zeal to control of the Internet. Yet, the regime also wants to know what its people are up to in the political sphere.

Canada's biggest internet service providers have announced that they are installing filters to block illegal child exploitation content from their customers.

We might joke about the "Great Firewall of China", but by the end of 2007 content blocking will be a fact of Internet life in the UK.

A firewall system for mobile phones has been launched by anti-virus company F-Secure. The system, called F-Secure Mobile Security is for devices based on Symbian S60 3rd Edition and Symbian OS v9.