Long live backward compatibility

If one desires to enable source routing within the borders of his/her network, so be it. Telnet and HTTP are still insecure but no one is disabling them just because of that. Instead everyone is having the option to use their secured versions or to use them as they are.

Several points to comment:

1. The title is dull indeed. However we should not blame the messenger for the content of what he have brought. While the source routing might be classified as undesirable feature, and turning it on by default can be unsecure, this is not a flaw of the protocol. A flaw is to assume 640kB memory big enough for the centuries to come, or to assign a whole class A network to a company with 300k employees. But that's the business of news making and getting the message to the customer - if one does not use such a "keyword", (s)he risks losing the attention of already annoyed audience.

2. It is questionable whether this feature had to be caried on from IP v4 to v6 - the set of valid uses is rather limited, and even in those ones there always can be found a better solution. However I have not seen the script of the discussions before setting IPv6 in stone, so cannot comment why the functionality was kept. There is no need for a standard which suits me and me only.

3. The real problem for me is the reaction to the issue with potential malicious usage of <something>! First reaction is the usage of strong words instead of brain activity. The second reaction is just panic - looking at the so called "patch" in OpenBSD (ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/4.0/common/012_route6.patch) one can see that the code is just commented out using an include statement. A REAL programmer would document the potential security implications instead of disabling a functionality.