This is one of the things I never really understood why it wasn't fixed. The privileged ports always looked at a somewhat working hack from the times, when ther

This is one of the things I never really understood why it wasn't fixed. The privileged ports always looked at a somewhat working hack from the times, when there were only a few machines on the net and the typical network services were few and well known. And it was a time, when having a root user as an active user account was normal. But things have changed since those times, even in the 90ies, it wasn't really reasonable any more - and solutions like sudo were implemented to give more reasonable access to higher privileges. Why wasn't anything done to the ports? I don't like the proposals presented in the article. It is perfectly fine to have a port range, which isn't available to every user on the system, but for those ports there should be a clear mechanism to configure, who is allowed to open them. So why not have an /etc/ports, where there is a port:uid mapping or a special directory (somewhere in /dev ?) where you have a file for each reserved port with only the owner of that file being able to open that port.