Today’s the day Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) ships, so we’re no longer under limitations as to what we can say about it. And boy is there a lot to say! As alluded to recently, there are a whole host of new Internet security issues with Leopard. Right now, however, we’re pretty busy finalizing the products people are going to need to be able to learn about and address those issues, so we’re going to start talking slowly.

For now, let’s start with the item nearest and dearest to our hearts: the firewall. Open Door Networks shipped the first Mac firewall back in 1998, so it’s a subject we know well. We still sell a firewall for Mac OS X, our DoorStop X firewall. The current release of that firewall (DoorStop X 2.0) works fine with Leopard, although we are working on a version with specific Leopard support.

We have always thought our firewall was an important and significant improvement to the basic firewall Apple “builds in” to Mac OS X. We believe this even more strongly with Apple’s radical redesign of the firewall built into Leopard, which is now in the Security System Preference. However we want to be careful as to how we express our concerns about this new firewall.

First and foremost, we are a Macintosh Internet security company. Our goal is to provide the tools and information users need to keep their Macs safe on the Internet. A key one of those tools is our DoorStop X firewall. Unfortunately, since we sell that tool, it sometimes conflicts a bit with the goal itself: when we want to get across important concerns about the Mac’s built-in firewall (of which we have more, rather than less, with Leopard’s new firewall) people may question our motives. So we need to tread as carefully as we can.

That all being said, we’re not going to say any more here yet. There will be lots to say in the days and weeks ahead, but, wanting to be careful, we’re going to think before we speak (an unusual concept in a blog). And, oh yeah, we still have those products to ship.

So as to make this Leopard-day entry not entirely content-free, however, let’s close with mention of a good Macworld article that provides a few details on Leopard’s built-in firewall, in its “Security” section. The article also touches on a number of other Leopard Internet features we’ll be talking about here, and addressing in our products, in the near future.