On woensdag, aug 13, 2003, at 21:38 Europe/Amsterdam, Crist Clark wrote:
Cool. So if you use private ports, you'll be totally protected from the Internet nasties (and the Internet protected from your broken or malicious traffic) in the same way RFC1918 addressing does the exact same thing now at the network layer.
That would be the theory, yes. (I grant you that it won't be quite this simple in practice.)
I'm sure everyone will filter private ports just as effectively as RFC1918 and martian addresses are filtered at borders now.
It's not the same thing. RFC 1918 and martian addresses aren't supposed to be present on the internet, but aren't automatically harmful. Having services that are explicitly labeled for internal use be visible to the rest of the world is potentially very harmful.