even more enjoyable. Perhaps it’s the satisfaction of realizing that the car
you just passed in the last lap is being driven by a real person, like you, and
not some computer program.
But the Internet connection that makes gaming so much fun also serves as a
doorway through which nefarious hackers can send malicious code, causing havoc
with your computer. Broadband users are especially fertile targets for bad
seeds. That’s why a firewall is so important. A good firewall, such as Internet
Connection Firewall (ICF) that comes with Windows XP, protects your computer
from attacks.
A firewall works by blocking communication ports that are used to transfer
data to and from your PC. However, games (and all applications that work over
the Internet) use those ports to communicate. This raises some questions that
we frequently encounter on message boards and in the Usenet: how does a
firewall affect the performance of online gaming? What do you have to do to
enjoy online gaming with a firewall in place? I’ll answer these questions in
this article.
How Ports Work
To get the most out of online gaming through a secure connection, you have to
have some idea of how games communicate over the Internet and how a firewall
works. Don’t worry; this discussion won’t get inaccessibly technical. I’ll
stick to layman’s terms. To start with, let’s look at how programs talk to
each other over the Internet. All Internet-aware programs communicate with
each other through ports. What, exactly, is a port?
Think of your Internet connection as a water conduit. But instead of thinking
of it as one big pipe, picture it as a conglomeration of thousands of small
pipes: 65,535 of them, to be exact. That is the number of Internet ports
through which communications can take place.
Different services use different ports—the assignment of which service uses
which port is more or less arbitrary. For example, World Wide Web communi-
cations Year End Party OKVIP 2024 use port 80. Why port 80? Because a few years ago, a bunch of
Internet-related people got together and decided that that’s how it would be.
Similarly, SMTP e-mail traffic uses port 25. Those same people decided that
that’s how that would go, and so on. These and other services use protocols
to transmit and receive their data through these ports. Two protocols that
they use are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol
(UDP).
The 65,535 ports are divided into three groups: Well Known Ports (ports 0
through 1023), Registered Ports (ports 1024 through 49151), and Dynamic or
Private Ports (all the rest). A list of port numbers and what services
commonly use them is kept up by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
Like other services, the Internet components of games use ports and protocols
to communicate over the Internet. When you play Halo online with a bunch of
other people, it has to transmit your keyboard and mouse-click data to the
server so it can tell when you move around or fire your weapon. In turn it
has to transmit world data back to your computer so you can see where other
people move so you can aim at them and chase them around. Halo and other
multiplayer games like the Quake family, Half-Life and mods such as Team
Fortress Classic and the popular Counter-Strike, Medal of Honor: Allied
Assault, Battlefield 1942 send their data down ports and listen for data from
the same or other ports. Game matchmaker services like GameSpy Arcade also
use ports to communicate.