Improve Apple Services with AirPort Base Stations
You can make iChat file transfers, iDisk, and Back to My Mac work better by turning on a setting with Apple AirPort base stations released starting in 2003. Launch AirPort Utility, select your base station, click Manual Setup, choose the Internet view, and click the NAT tab. Check the Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) box, and click Update. NAT-PMP lets your Mac OS X computer give Apple information to connect back into a network that's otherwise unreachable from the rest of the Internet. This speeds updates and makes connections work better for services run by Apple.
Written by
Glenn Fleishman
Recent TidBITS Talk Discussions
- Alternatives to MobileMe for syncing calendars between iPad/Mac (1 message)
- Free anti-virus for the Mac (20 messages)
- iTunes 10 syncing iPod Touch 4.1 (2 messages)
- Thoughts about Ping (16 messages)
Related Articles
- Explaining the URL-Based Mac OS X Vulnerability (24 May 04)
- URL-Based Mac OS X Vulnerability Revealed (24 May 04)
Published in TidBITS 732.
Subscribe to our weekly email edition.
- Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.3.4 Update
- Creo Six Degrees 2.0 Supports More Email Programs
- Ergonis's KeyCue Offers Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheet
- Eudora 6.1.1 Released
- PowerMail 5 Released
- Apple Fixes Two Security Holes
- AirPort Express Brings Audio, Portability to Wireless Networking
- Tech Tool Pro 4 Joins Our Disk Repair Comparison
- Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/07-Jun-04
Security Update 2004-06-07 Plugs Launch Services Holes
Just as we were about to wrap this issue, including a brief bit about an update to Paranoid Android - Unsanity's hack for warning the user about the launching of unknown URL schemes - Apple released Security Update 2004-06-07, which claims to fix all of the recently identified security vulnerabilities in Mac OS X (see our articles on the topic in TidBITS-731 for full details on what was broken).
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07679>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07680>
<http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/pa/>
In short, the security update revises Launch Services so it alerts the user to applications that have not been explicitly launched before (with a dialog along the lines of the one Paranoid Android puts up). It also removes the registration of the disk URL scheme so disk images accessed via disk URLs no longer mount automatically. A change to Safari eliminates a feature that could open certain downloaded files when the Show in Finder button was clicked. And lastly, an unrelated fix enables telnet URLs to have port numbers specified with them again; that functionality had been removed by a previous security update. See Apple's articles on the topic for more details and a look at the new alert.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html? artnum=61798>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html? artnum=25785>
Security Update 2004-06-07 is available via Software Update; it's also available as a 900K standalone download for both Mac OS X 10.3.4 and Mac OS X 10.2.8.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ securityupdate_2004-06-07_(_10_3_4).html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ securityupdate_2004-06-07_(_10_2_8).html>
Needless to say, we haven't had time to evaluate how well Apple's fixes work or if they cause any other problems, but we'll be tracking user reports on TidBITS Talk and other forums in the upcoming week.
![](/file/11593/db.tidbits.com.tar/db.tidbits.com/images/badges/tb-house-ad.gif)
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
Special thanks this week to John & Nichola Collins, Chris Williams,
John K. Lilley, and Honeymoons By Sunset for their generous support!