Missing the cage

When Rosie and I first came to the bay area in 1992, we visited San Francisco Zoo. One of the exhibits there were polar bears, and we watched one pace out a looping walk, his feet hitting the same spot each time through, one leg swinging out over the edge of the moat on each circuit. He was completely accustomed to his cage.

Reading Ars Technica's commentary on Airport Extreme's IPv6 support reminded me of this. Apparently, if you use this device, your computers can route across the world again; people can connect to them from anywhere, just as the internet was designed to behave. That's what the 'inter' part of the name is about.

That's right, if you enable password protected services that are off by default, like ssh and ftp, on your Mac, the new Airport base stations actually route them, instead of requiring further buggering about with port mapping and explicit protocol translation through packet sniffing to get them to behave as they were designed. This gives Iljitsch van Beijnum a fit of conniptions, because he'd apparently rather rely on the illusionary security of a firewall then actually securing his machines services. Lets hope he doesn't own any laptops.

Technorati Tags: Apple, internet, security, Wifi