security blather Re: [techtalk] login restriction

[Fan, Laurel]

Susannah D. Rosenberg, indrani at mindspring.com, said:
> yep. but there's a difference between being able to /telnet/ to port 25,
> and opening an smtp connection to port 25.

No, there is not.

Unless by "telnet" you mean something besides "run a program named telnet
and connect to port 25".  (In which case, what do you mean?)

If I can, from my computer, open an "smtp connection" to port 25 on
somehost,
I can run "telnet somehost 25".  Neither of which has anything at all to do
with telnetd.

There is nothing inherently insecure about a port or a protocol.  All that
matters is what the program on the other end does with it.