Surprised no one has mentioned the Carterphone decision.
In the late 1960s, AT&T argued that a newfangled third-party device called a modem would cause "network harm" if it were attached to the network.
The US FCC overruled that approach with the landmark 1968 Carterphone decision. It's difficult to overstate the decision's importance; it made the entire data comm industry possible by allowing any vendor's equipment to use a carrier's common network.
AT&T was blowing smoke then about network harm. Apple is doing the same here.
A historical nit: Neither the Securityfocus article nor Marcus Ranum claim to have "invented" the proxy firewall.
Some kid named Kevin Mitnick was poking around DEC's network in the late 1980s, and Marcus built a proxy that shut him out. An overzealous DEC salesdroid heard about it and claimed to DuPont that DEC had this new proxy firewall thingy DuPont could buy.
This was arguably the first *commercial* proxy firewall, but it wasn't necessarily the first one.
Brian Reid of DEC Western Research Labs had proxy boxes running in his labs at least a couple of years before Marcus was asked to boot out Kevin Mitnick. And Sun had a firewall in the works int he late 1980s that they didn't commercialize until much later.
The article rightly describes Marcus as an innovator. His achievements cover not only firewalls but also VPNs and intrusion detection/prevention. But that doesn't mean, and he didn't say, he built the first proxy firewall.
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Surprised no one has mentioned the Carterphone decision.
In the late 1960s, AT&T argued that a newfangled third-party device called a modem would cause "network harm" if it were attached to the network.
The US FCC overruled that approach with the landmark 1968 Carterphone decision. It's difficult to overstate the decision's importance; it made the entire data comm industry possible by allowing any vendor's equipment to use a carrier's common network.
AT&T was blowing smoke then about network harm. Apple is doing the same here.
Does anyone know if IE7 will fix the absolute worst behavior in IE -- closing TCP connections with RST rather than FIN?
This bad behavior:
--exists in IE6 and earlier
--violates RFC 793 sections 3.4 and 3.5
--ties up LOTS of memory in zillions of stateful devices (firewalls, VPN gateways, L4 and L7 load balancers, and on and on)
--does not belong to the MS TCP/IP stack, since other applications (eg, telnet) close connections properly
I haven't played with IE7 yet. Someone please tell me MS has finally addressed this abomination.
In a shocking development, researchers in China report that Huawei routers exhibit the exact same vulnerabilities as those found in Cisco devices.
A historical nit: Neither the Securityfocus article nor Marcus Ranum claim to have "invented" the proxy firewall.
Some kid named Kevin Mitnick was poking around DEC's network in the late 1980s, and Marcus built a proxy that shut him out. An overzealous DEC salesdroid heard about it and claimed to DuPont that DEC had this new proxy firewall thingy DuPont could buy.
This was arguably the first *commercial* proxy firewall, but it wasn't necessarily the first one.
Brian Reid of DEC Western Research Labs had proxy boxes running in his labs at least a couple of years before Marcus was asked to boot out Kevin Mitnick. And Sun had a firewall in the works int he late 1980s that they didn't commercialize until much later.
The article rightly describes Marcus as an innovator. His achievements cover not only firewalls but also VPNs and intrusion detection/prevention. But that doesn't mean, and he didn't say, he built the first proxy firewall.
XP Service Pack 2