firewall request

Thank you both for your replies, Chris and Kurt. Chris suggested shorter posts and this is obviously necessary. As I mentioned previously, by default I disable packagekitd and remove gnome-packagekit and gnome-software-installer. And I don't use wine. The problem is not a personal one, it's about other people gaining the confidence to have a go themselves. Chris also rightly questioned wether or not this is a firewall issue, the answer is both yes and no. For people migrating from Windows this is where they are used to finding such a feature, and firewalld is already monitoring network ports. When it becomes a security issue, and it will, is when people need to install propriety drivers for devices. At some stage these drivers are going to become more popular and more sophisticated, sophisticated enough to include spyware. Cheers, Andrew.