Comment 83 for bug 6290

This is at least in part a Kernel related issue. There are two firewire stacks in the kernel, the old one (which this bug was originally opened against) which has serious security configurability issues, and a new one which has them resolved. For many of the recent releases both the firewire stacks have been available, but the older one selected by default. From Maverick this choice has been reversed such that the new stack is the default. This should resolve the security handling of the interfaces and resolve this issue for kino on maverick and later. Please let us know if you are testing on Maverick and this is not the case.

For Lucid the switch to the new stack by default was deemed to risky before release as it is an LTS. Therefore we went with the old stack on Lucid, but the new can be selected by switching the blacklisting in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf. Now that Lucid is released we cannot just change the default over to the new stack for everyone, the regression potential is too great for an LTS. However there are several work-arounds available, switching to the new stack, changing the group on the bluetooth devices, or running the applications with more priviledge via sudo.

Based on this I am going to close the Maverick task for the kernel Fix Released, and close the Lucid task for the kernel Won't Fix.