My network guy says firewalls are good. I don't know about that. Lock them down enough and say goodbye to some very cool Flash features. Ok so maybe network security should be more important that building a desktop Flash-based XML reader (ie: RSS, my precious). It seems some Firewalls can prevent your Flash Player on your desktop from having access to the outside world and could put a crimp in my plans for Google Sidebar. Of course this issue may only be for extremely secure networks. Maybe I should just stick with non-loading development... Options exist though these may ruin my movie. According to the Flash-XML FAQ, you could switch what port Flash reads external data from, but this may cause more problems than not getting any data at all. Plus, once the project is deployed to the web the issues disappear, since most web servers seems to be a little more open than most networks. What do you think? For more information on XML in Flash check out the Flash-XML FAQ at the link below.

thanks Microsoft for the image