Can an old Mac actually ignore network security?
I don’t think it’s completely inconceivable that there could be a minor bug in the AFP server on OS X that misreports the permissions when talking to such an ancient client. I wrote an AFP server, many years ago, and even back then Apple had released several different versions of the protocol. I think 2.1 was current when I was working with it, and there were a handful of weirdnesses you had to account for if you wanted to let machines using AFP 1.1 or 1.0 connect to your server. I think it is possible that there is some code in there that only applies to really old Macs, and that it’s somehow misbehaving. A quick scan of Apple’s developer site shows that they’re up to AFP 3.1 by now; unhelpfully, they don’t seem to have any documentation for the older versions, so I can’t see what’s changed. Still, it’s not hard to imagine that the command for requesting file parameters might have changed, and that some obscure piece of emulation code for the old version of the command might be conver
I don’t believe he was accessing files which weren’t purposefully shared. I don’t believe he could access just any files he wanted. If he’s right, then even in the best days of OS 9 this same trick should have been possible. I had every hack and crack in the universe and never found one to do such a thing. There were some nice Chooser replacements which would show if Guest access was turned on in a shared device listed in the Chooser right next to its icon (which saved from having to double-click on the thing), but it didn’t give any extra access. There also was JChooser which provided its own back-door sharing between computers, but it had to be installed first on any Mac you wanted to access. To believe your friend, I’d need to see a screen shot of all the zones in the Chooser, a screen shot of the list of all the Macs listed in at least a few of those zones, screen shots of *all* of the login screens of *all* the Macs in at least one of those zones. If your friend is right, the logi
