Norton Personal Firewall

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Norton Personal Firewall is a computer firewall application produced by Symantec. It includes capabilities such as ad blocking, different rule sets for different networks, a privacy feature to prevent the unwanted disclosure of private information, and control of individual applications' Internet access. It employs Symantec's LiveUpdate to periodically update the software. The current version (2006) sells in the USA for about US$50. This product is sometimes bundled with other Norton products such as their antivirus program. The price includes one year of updates; after this period is over, the user may pay to renew the update subscription, although the product will work without updates.

The ad-blocking feature of this software actually rewrites the HTML that your browser uses to display web pages. It searches for any text it thinks is related to ads and prevents the web page for being displayed. When this happens there is no notification from Norton Personal Firewall.

Ad blocking also prevents Microsoft Internet Explorer from running ActiveX plugins. Therefore AJAX and other 'web 2.0' functionality will not work with ad-blocking turned on.

To turn ad-blocking off, right-click the Norton Personal Firewall's system tray icon, then click 'Open Norton Personal Firewall'. Then click 'Turn off' with Ad-blocking highlighted. Then clear your cache and restart your browser.