OK, this is a call out really to all you coders and assorted geeks who can help explain this to me.
Here’s the issue: companies often don’t allow access to Second Life, or aren’t convinced that it’s a good idea, because of the number of ports that need to be opened in order to access the virtual environment. Contrary perhaps to popular belief, it’s not usually Second Life content that’s the issue but rather the security fears raised from opening up internal systems to the outside world.
But Linden Labs seems to be trying to tackle this issue by ‘renting a coder’ to plug this hole. Their request explains:
“The project requires embedding SOCKS 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
SOCKS#SOCKS_5_protocol ) into the Open Source Second Life client ( http://wiki.secondlife.com/ wiki/Snowglobe ) thus allowing Second Life to run via a proxy without the need to open up firewall ports. Second Life runs on Windows, Mac, and linux and therefore all need to be supported with SOCKS 5 .”
Now, I’m no techy (clearly) but I’d be curious to know: if Second Life gets SOCKS, would this help overcome the security fears of opening up extra ports? Is this a workable solution?
Inquiring mind wants to know.
Can’o'worms. SOCKS would make the application more welcome on corporate networks, because it is a proxy technology. As a proxy technology, it *also* makes it fairly trivial for a user to obscure their source IP address.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing or just a thing? I suppose it depends on whether making the application more attractive to corporates outweighs the potential problems.