Leopard Firewall Rant

    I’ve recently installed GrowlTunes to let me know when a song switches within iTunes. This is nice and all but usually I know the song by the time the notification appears. Anyhow, Growl allows you to push the updates to another computer, which can be rather helpful for GrowlTunes or Adium if you get the twitter IMs (when it’s working). But I, being security conscience, like to have the firewall on my macbook running. With this, there is no way to allow GrowlTunes to penetrate the firewall. So I have to just shut off the firewall. Which is completely unnecessary in my opinion, from a security standpoint.

    I actually prefer the “˜old’ 10.4 way of having the firewall with the advanced option to set which ports to allow. This (at least to me) is so much easier than having an application based firewall with ABSOLUTELY NO advanced features. This is completely unacceptable and useless to the ‘power user’. There should be an option, even if you have to jump through two hoops to turn the damn thing on. Turn on “˜easy’ firewall, or turn on “˜advanced firewall’. Particularly with so many laptops being sold within the past quarter by Apple, one would figure that more users would be worried about the state of security when using a laptop outside of your own home ‘secure’ network.

    Just my thoughts…

    Wayne

    I'm into everything technology related, particularly anything Apple related. I enjoy programming and tend to lean towards server-based technologies over client-based. You can contact me on twitter, via e-mail, or follow me on friendfeed.