Not long after an initial test of eEye Security’s Blink personal computer security software, I received an email from Morey Haber, VP for Product Management at eEye…
Thank you very much for taking the time to review Blink. I am the VP for Product Management at eEye and would like to know what version of Blink you performed this review on ?
The latest version, Blink 3.2, does not suffer from the firewall prompting issues you described and when a permanent rule is created (check box in the prompt), the prompt is presented once and the entire application is trusted.
In addition, the application has its grass roots in many enterprise businesses and government and has a mature client base in these segments. The consumer or personal market is a new initiative for us and the newer releases have simplified the experience for clients and overcome these anomalies.
A free one year version is available from our website. http://www.eeye.com
Thank you very much for your time and I hope you will take a second look at out latest release.
Sincerely,
eEye Digital Security Product Management
I did take Mr. Haber’s advice to download and try the newer version 3.2 of Blink. I had tried a early version of the software in my first review.
I began by visiting the eEye Blink site. The registration and download process is very easy, quick, and unobtrusive. Remember that this is a one-year license. Ostensibly after one year you will need to purchase the product. That is much better than many of the Norton’s and McAfee’s that only offer three month trials. I liked a few of features of the installation including…
- Privacy policy is short and well-written. Nothing alarming there.
- Allows user to select installation path
- Reminds to check Windows Update for latest patches
- No reboot necessary
The application immediately seeks to download an update once it is running. It then begins to ask about the behavior of many application in your computer that connect to the internet. I vividly remember that Windows Media and Skype made frequent appearances.
It features a control panel that is strikingly similar to Microsoft Window’s own control panel. You can pick a program component and choose a simple on/off option or dig deeper for many options.
A check of system resource usage still shows an impressive low amount of memory and CPU cycle usage. This is refreshing compared to Blink’s bloated counterparts from Symantec and McAfee.
I was still frustrated with the repeated asking of permission for applications to access the internet. I would make a couple of recommendations to Blink’s developers. By default have Blink’s
application firewall ask about each application versus asking for each port requested by each application. This can lead to what appears to the untrained eye as several requests for the same application. The other recommendation would be for Blink to create a permanent rule by default. It took me a couple of attempts to authorize Skype before I checked the “permanent rule” check mark.
Overall, I would recommend this product for the home user. The part of this software that still differentiates it from it’s competitors is that it is proactively looking for bad software or malware behavior instead of just comparing to a list of known viruses and spyware. It removes the zero-day attack hysteria that strikes the IT community frequently.