I just bought a new MacBook, as I'm ste ing down from owning a Pro and moving to a MacBook/iMac setup (more on that later), and I noticed something a little disconcerting: after going through the generic setup out of the box, Mac OS X's firewall was not enabled by default. I didn't fiddle with any settings during the initial boot and setup (besides entering a pa word for my wifi network and my .Mac credentials - about the only settings you can fiddle with), and I otted this strange quirk in the Sharing Preference Pane when going to name my machine before the initial .Mac sync.
What gives? Is Mac OS X 10.4's firewall enabled by default or not? I honestly don't remember which exact version of 10.4 this MacBook shi ed with (I ran Software Update immediately on startup and only caught this firewall quirk after the restart), and I'm certainly not some certified, 6-figure security expert - I'm only reporting what I saw with this initial setup.
So does anyone know what's going on? Discu io about Mac OS X's (and 10.4 ecifically) inherent security often cite the firewall being turned on by default - though that clearly wa 't the case with this machine. What say you, TUAW readers?
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