Slashdot Mirror
Kuro5hin - Bitter and Hopeful
Dylan Griffiths, known to Kuro5hin users as Inoshiro, gives us the sysadmin play-by-play:
"This started on Sunday night. Basically, I had been over at a friend's place, there had been a storm watch, and he's a ham radio guy. He's a member of Canwatch, which is a volunteer ham radio thing you can do once you get a license. We were out driving around all afternoon. We got home, watched some TV, and dropped me off at home. At that point it was pretty late and I was about to go to bed. Normally, I would just go to bed, but I sat in front of the computer to check out Kuro5hin, and I noticed that there were about nine stories in the moderation queue. I thought that was a bit odd, because we normally get one or two stories at a time, and they get voted on, so they either show up or disappear quickly. I went to the submission queue, and I saw one or two stories posted by people with handles, and the rest were all Anonymous Hero. I initially thought that perhaps some fellow had decided to post a few things on Sunday night so it would be there for Monday morning, because weekend traffic is about half of our weekday traffic. I figured I would just delete the extras. The subject lines for the submissions were all just random strings of text. I didn't know why that would be, so I deleted a couple of them, and noticed that a couple came back. So, I logged into the server and I was going to see if I could block the garbage submissions. I also logged into the IRC channel to see if anyone knew what was going on. That's where people told me about a user named Kano, and how he was angry that his story was voted down so quickly. In the interest of getting the facts, I wanted to block what was going on, and get more of the story. I blocked it, fired off a couple of mails to [Kuro5hin creator] Rusty (Foster), and talked with some of the guys on IRC because on the whole, they're nice people. Kuro5hin has a great bunch of people that helped me and Rusty through this. We talked about it, and one of the channel members mentioned that the machine the attacks were coming from looked like it had a bunch of ports open. When I traced it through the whois database, it was a part of a server farm in a hosting company. So, you'd think they'd only have web, and maybe ssh and telnet open for admin purposes, and everything else would be centralized, because that's what you do when you have 400 machines."
The team leaps to action
Inoshiro continues, "Rusty joined the chat on Sunday night, and the IRC channel users banded together. We banned two subnets, and the channel people helped us clean up the submission queue. The box on one of the subnets we banned was obviously cracked. In addition to ftp ssh and http, they had sunrpc open, nfs, mysql and irc. So, besides the obvious fact that mysql should be open like that and the Sunrpc services, irc is something you don't see on a webhosting farm. I don't think the spammer expected us to block him quite so quickly. It took me about 40 minutes for me to block him because a router between me and k5 went mad and was giving me 3000ms latency. It was the first time I'd actually had to do it. Once it was blocked, that's when the channel helped us clean up. Then, within 20 minutes, it started coming in again. That one was blocked within about ten minutes, and that was a proxy server. Everything else since then has been cracked boxes.
"I got it down to the point where we would see five scroll by, and when we got to the end, I basically ignored everything else I was doing, and blocked submissions as they came in. It wasn't until Monday night that the router between myself and k5 stopped giving us incredibly high ping times.
"I went to bed, and I slept in a little bit. I got up, joined the channel. Since I finished school earlier this month, I talk to people in the channel in the morning because most of the people I know are asleep or have a job. I've been sort of looking for employment recently, but I've been spending a lot of time working on k5. I usually talk to them in the channel, because Rusty was gone for two weeks and I was the only admin around. I'd been spending more time just talking to people. We had a bit of a chat, a few people proposed ideas about who they thought might have done it. Nothing was really resolved. Then I noticed that there was more stuff coming in the queue. I contacted Rusty at work, and he joined the IRC chat, and we talked about it. We spent Monday getting some of the scoop developers to disable anonymous story submissions, then we added logging to a bunch of things. Basically, Monday was the day when we were babysitting k5. The poster would switch their submission to a new cracked box. I was watching the output of the log and ipchains the subnet, look up the person responsible, and cc: it to Rusty. The people Rusty used to work for, intes.net, offered legal support. They've been really great about it because even though Rusty doesn't work for them anymore, they were still hosting the box until we get it all moved."
On Tuesday, the system abuse continued not only in the submission queue, but also in the commenting system used by readers to share their feelings or concerns about news items that Kuro5hin posts throughout the day.
More from Inoshiro: "I mailed [Slashdot Founder] Rob (Malda) on Tuesday morning, and I wasn't sure how he'd take it. Usually his replies are given out with as few words as possible. After a couple of replies, we were sending 8 or 9 paragraphs back and forth all day. He suggested a few things, and Rusty said he didn't realize it could have gotten that bad so quickly. My buddy from Sunday came over, and I watching Kuro5hin and he was helping me set up networking booting with an OpenBSD box I have here. It was ten o'clock, and we went to watch The Simpsons. While we watched, the guy had just been spamming the server more. he started spamming about fifteen minutes after we went to watch The Simpsons. How could someone do this? This is like proving a windshield is made of glass by smashing it."
So, at three in the morning at the Villa Hotel in San Mateo, Rusty Foster, Kuro5hin's creator, replaced his website with a black page telling the story of the denial of service attacks. I got a chance to speak to Rusty today while he was in his office at OpenSales.
Rusty said, "Today I'm bitter and hopeful. Yesterday I was bitter and depressed. It bothers me a lot, is the best I can put it."
The fact that Kuro5hin is entirely volunteer-run, added to the fact that they've got an active IRC presence and die-hard fans, lends itself to community building. People read Kuro5hin, post comments, and share their feelings and criticisms with people around the world. In the end, the Kuro5hin staff is resolved to not let the misguided destruction of one incident destroy the community they have built from the ground up.
"I think that we will get the site back up," Rusty said. "It will not be entirely the same as it was before. Anonymous access is gonna go. That's all there is to it. There's a place for anonymous access and I'm all for free speech, but there's also got to be a place for real people who will stand up and identify themselves, more or less. We're not even asking for identities, we're asking people to create a pseudonym and use it. Slashdot pretty much has the market cornered on free and open access, and I'm a lot more impressed now with the crap you put up with."
I'm aiming for a month. I'm leaving in August to go to Italy, and then immediately after that, my sister's getting married. I won't be back here with reliable access until the middle off August. There are a bunch of great developers that work on the code, and I'm going to put together a list of things that need to be done. Knowing them, they'll probably do most of them. Whatever remains, I'll do when I get back, and then we will re-launch amid great fanfare. I got a lot of great E-mails from people supporting the site, and a lot of them supprting my decision to close it until we've taken care of the problem, and I would like to thank them collectively for all their support, making me feel better, and inspiring me to actually get the site back."
Update: 07/26 08:59 PM by CT : Just wanted to throw my 2 bits in... VA Linux Systems is gonna help with some hardware since the Kuro5hin system really was strugglign to keep up with their existing hardware. That doesn't address the spam attacks which we've also spent quite a bit of time discussing. I'm personally finding this really interesting since I've gone through it all with Slashdot over the years, and seeing it done to someone else with the benefit of hindsight and experience is quite interesting. The frusteration you feel when something you work so hard on is screwed with by troublemakers is hard to describe: especially when you're just a volunteer. Slashdot wouldn't have survived that stage without help from a lot of people... Best of luck to you guys, and I hope to see ya pull through this.
I have been skooled.
You have learned me the haiku.
I will try harder.
....
Kuro5hin is gone
To rally its defenses.
Wait in eager hope.
We want to HELP k5, not steal what makes it different...
Interbase documentaion is available from ftp://ftp2.interbase.c om/pub/products/beta6.0/ib_b60_doc.zip
It's in PDF, from memory.
Back in the distant history of slashdot, there was an NSA story with an AC who claimed to have worked in sigint.
A few "Company X is going down, I know because I work there" posts, but otherwise you're right.
Of course, the difference between "MrBogus (173033)" and Anonymous Coward is 1 point and a whole lotta nothing.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Heh. Yet another illustration that humans, in general, are far more concerned with making other people suffer than in bettering themselves. After all, it's FUN to hurt people and break things! ;)
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
So let's do something. Have 'em hand over transcripts of their server logs; I've got a full-on Tiger team (not for employ, and they're not all on one team; they're my friends - but they damned well know what they're doing) - let's sift through this crap and find the bastards. While we're at it, anyone who's able to, let's sift through the source code to their site and figure out how to keep crap like this from happening WITHOUT killing the freedoms that sites like this offer.
Heck, why stop with open-source, distributed-development software? Let's go for distributed-development network infrastructure and policing as well. This was obviously perpetrated for purely malicious purpose and for no good reason, so let's find the bastards and show them what for.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
But otherwise, you're basically right--they are all GPL so anybody who thinks they can do better are free to do so.
ufdraco
Amen, brother Lethargy!
I fully agree with Mr. Moore's implied statements. I'm still planning to vote for Gore (as he assumed) but now, at least, I will be sure to vote. (Before, it was going to be just 'if I have time'...) While some of the moderators believe that your comment is a troll (I *DO* have to agree with the two that think it offtopic, even if it *IS* good...) I found it very enlightening.
Hey, not all trolls are bad trolls... ;-)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I see that they've noticed a number of cracked boxes used in the attacks, but if *I* were the victim of something like this I would be on the phone in a second to the people running the networks of these cracked boxes. An on-going attack like this is typically very easy to spot from a network point of view, and with some competant admins, you can go from there straight back to the source.
I mean it may take a few times (if the box is vulnerable, sure there's an increased likelyhood of a lack of clueful administration) before you'll find someone that can help you, and if they're bouncing between multiple hops, it'll mean coordinating or conferencing phone calls, but it CAN be done.
The reason script kiddies get away with shit like this is because nobody ever takes the time and effort to track them down and prosecute. Since nobody does it, the l33t0 hax0r kiddies figure they're invincible and keep right on doing it.
The tools DO exist to track them down. There's always a trail if you can just find admins willing to help you every hop of the way. Given the nature of the attack, he's probably using the cracked machines solely for their unique network addresses, not as a means of hiding his identity. Given the number of such hosts, it should have been trivially easy to find SOMEONE willing to track this asshole back to his ISP.
two words: jona & kano
-DAVEO
I for one would rather have "14 year old morons" trying to crack my site than someone who actually knows better. If an amateur can get into your stuff, you've got problems. If we didn't have these kids screwing around with our websites (and helping us evaluate our security, in a roundabout and annoying way), the experienced (possibily paid off by the competition) could come along and take down/hack/etc whatever they wanted with hardly the blink of an eye. If you can't lockdown when a script kiddie comes along, you're screwed. Granted, k5 is a volunteer site etc etc, they shouldn't need to setup tight security, but thats the world we live in, and its not going to change.
;)
Slashdot deciding on what is right and wrong isn't really a good idea. News is (ideally) unbiased. News != Opinion. Of course, this is never true and any account of anything is inherently biased in some way, but there are levels of bias and slashdot is fairly unbiased imho (other than linux/opensource issues, of course
Clear rules as far as reporting goes brings us closer and closer to the orwellian nightmare of 1984.
In fact, Kuro5hin encourages anonymous browsing and posting. Anonymous messages on Scoop sites like K5 are posted under the username "Anonymous Hero." Both stories and comments can be posted anonymously, though only logged-in users can vote in the polls and moderation queue.
Agreed.. k5 refered to 'the other guys' but it was never all that harsh.. It was a little friendly competition. Slashdot is a big dog, you've gotta expect k5 to give them shit when they can.
Heh. 100,000 line that is (always good to come off like a moron in the first few words :))
:)
Since I'm already posting this, might as well add some more info. It's running Java 1.1 servlets (JServ/Apache) with MySQL.
That's all
--
I disagree. The source of the proposition is integral to the amount of trust I am willing to invest in the research, effort and integrity of that proposition, in an environment where I may not have access to all the data and rules applicable.
In other words.. Get a face, get a name, don't hide behind AC's skirts.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
>Isn't the MAC address also in an IP header?
No, it's in the ethernet header. And only if
the source is on the same segment as the target.
>Is that spoofable?
Yes.
Umm. I don't think Ben Franklin ever held an elected position. Then again, Dubya hasn't either.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Did I mention anything about hacking those boxes?
Post the IP's of the cracker, not the cracked boxes.
False. Post the IPs of both so we can contact those admins and slashdot them with requests to fix those systems to stop the DoS, and then pressure the authorities to get involved.
You, 11223, jump to conclusions far too quickly. Not only that, but your posting history seems conspicuous to say the least... troll.
start by banning ACs I would have argued with you before trying to moderate. ACs seem like a way to be inclusive and bring in fresh and new ideas. Yet I was astounded at what I saw at -1. The waste. Most definitely less than uplifting.
Apparently this script was used to spam K5, and the guy that created it has a web site, although it offers no explanation on WHY they did this. Maybe having the script will help you block it. The address of the script was posted as another anonymous message in this thread.
He claims he was inspired by Slashtroll, a similar script for trolling Slashdot. The author of Slashtroll (zk65) removed the program after seeing what happened to K5, and posted a message here.
I think this was metioned in the other story, but it's such a good idea that it bears repeating here.
How about making kuro5hin based on a trust metric?
Here's how it might start out. rusty and Inoshiro and a few trusted other (perhaps loyal kuro5hin readers) would start off as the web of trust. As people begin to submit stories and get them moved to the front page, they can get "moderated" up to be trusted to submit reasonable stories. Perhaps as people gain trust, they can have their stories moved to the front page faster. Presumably, these same people would eventually be included in the trust web and extended "moderation" privileges. And soon you would have enough people that the load would be distributed evenly.
Of course, there could also be an increasingly (exponential) penalty for submitting crap, eventually cumulating in the banishment of the user/IP from submitting stories for some amount of time. If the banishment is not for all time, then the trust would have to be slowly extended back to this person. This would hopefully prevent cyclical occurences of spammation.
I think this preserves the idea of kuro5hin, allowing the community to decide what gets posted, while limiting the community to something reasonable. The same idea could even be applied to comments as well, to prevent people from screwing the comment queue as well.
Thinking of it in Slashdot terms, for those of you who are die-hard Slashdot fans, the trust web is akin to karma.
I really miss kuro5hin. This was the first idea that popped into my head for fixing things.
What do people think?
But really, leave reasoning to people who are capable of it. For now, just repeat after me: If somebody with a nick says the sky is green, and an AC says it's blue, the guy with the nick is still a moron and the AC is still right, regardless of which statement is associated with which name.
He can reason better than you can. Your empirical anylsis has one major flaw which cannot be said enough, because you don't seem to listen: NO EVIDENCE, nothing, in fact all evidence suggests the opposite. I am in no way saying malda, roblimo, or anyone is god/deserves more respect than another human. But when everything points towards /. and kuro5hin getting along like friends, especially with kuro5hin current page providing links to discuss on /., claiming a viewpoint like this is just dumb.
Not done yet...
You also claimed in your original post that /. and kuro5hin were "competitors" of somekind. How so? /. is up there with sites like arstechnica ZDnet and C|net. Kuro5hin is a hobbiest site done in its spare time for chrissake. They've even said on the blackout page that they are considering moving the focus to nicks only to avoid DOS attacks, and you are posting as an AC here. Ha! That's just funny.
I'll go now
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
Intermediate links? They're all fine: pings and traceroutes go through without problems in tens of milliseconds. It's just /.- it's by far the least reliable site I visit often. (Phillynews.com is a distant second.)
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Check again: well it got posted. Decided to write this message. Took 3 attempts to get the post comment page, and so far at least one failure to post...
Sigh
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
No proof. No evidence. No reason for believing something other than you have a personal gripe against /. for some reason.
I note you're afraid to stake *ANY* name behind what you say.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
The level of clue on Slashdot has dropped exponentially for the last several months (at least). I don't care about all the morons who post on Slashdot. I can ignore them even when browsing at -1.
But, I don't want them picking the stories I read.
Looks like this script kiddie is turning his attention on to other sites using scoop as well.
Although I didn't see any problems on it earlier this week, Scoop.kuro5hin.org has been under attack all day.
--
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
This may be slightly off-topic but I haven't been able to access www.yahoo.com for almost twenty-four hours. I first thought it might have been a Mozilla M16 bug but the same problem occurs with Netscape ,Lynx and Konqeror.
I couldn't find any news items about a Yahoo dos today.
Just my isps dns?
Otherwise known as a "Clue-by-Four", or just a big, heavy stick!! Actually I am a 6'0" 295 lb sysadmin with a bad attitude, but my LART is actually a 2' length of 7/8" coax cable with a stainless barrel connector at the end damn, knew I should post more, submitted with the wrong passwd...hehe
....There is nothing a Cattle Prod and a foot length of 7/8" satellite coaxial can't fix/
I don't have Rusty's email address, but I would also be willing to donate.
Additionally, I intend to be unemployed for a couple of weeks in August, and would happily volunteer time to do grunt coding work, etc, if they need it.
Robert West
aphrael@nospam@burble.org
I personally have made at least five posts in the last year or so with information that I would not have been able to pass on if I could not be an AC. Most recently this included the 5-day exchange server outage at the large company that I work for, which was due to bugs which Microsoft will never own up to in public. I don't know if my posts were "informative" or "interesting", but I do know they would probably terminate my current employment if they were traced back to me. I also know that they contain information that needs to be passed on to the world, and I can't do that if I'm not an AC.
Also, originally registered users who admitted they were moderators lost their moderator access, so it was necessary to post discussions of moderation as an AC. This hasn't been enforced for a while, though, as far as I can tell.
...signed, Anonymous Coward (of course)
I saw an article earlier (possibly on Wired?) that cryptome was also suffering from a DOS attack.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I've notice that refresh seems to work
For me, I've noticed major issues with the slashdot.org address. If I manually switch the link to slashdot.com, I get an instant reponse, and about twice the speed at loading the page, before IE decides to take an hour processing the HTML for display... (still faster than Netscape, though, only reason I use it).
My connection is a T1 to UUNET, and it's normally a VERY empty T1 at that. Late at night, west coast, about 1-2 people sharing the T1 with me...
That's what an AC had to say about user #1219. Next he'll probably say Linux was a great OS until that Torvalds guy got involved.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
True. Although shouldn't a responsible developer develop the POC, notify the authors af the bug, and maybe even offer up a patch? Preferably before releasing the POC code to anyone who asks? But I did make an invalid assumption, and it is just a tool. And to answer your side note, /. should be able to pull IPs from server logs. Unless the commentator goes to an _awful_ lot of trouble. Or is running through a proxy.
itachi, who spoke too soon. But is still curious as to motivation...
Why don't you pick on the computer industry and start doing some muckraking on the extremely low quality of commercial software?
Actually, Nader is doing just that--one of his latest projects is Appraising Microsoft; their appraisal has been mostly negative, and that includes the quality of MS software, or rather the lack thereof. Nader's web site, Essential Information, covers a lot of areas, but rear-engined cars aren't among them. As for the Corvair, Nader happened to be right--I almost died in a Corvair spin-out. But that's ancient history; do you also still bemoan the South's failure to win an immediate victory in the US Civil War?
Calling slashdot and k5 "enemies" is immature schoolyard drivel. Many of the people I work with know/love kuro5hin and read it often.
Rob explained several times that Slashdot's submission queue is not open because trolls (ahem) would turn it into a game. There however several hidden forums where you're free to create your own and post anything you want.
It's not like my username gives anyone any details about me. It is anonymous. The only reason for an AC is make it easier/quicker when you can't be bothered (or to avoid moderation flack).
ACs don't allow two-way conversations. Usernames do. ACs are pointless.
Once this kind of nonsense starts there is not a whole lot one can do about it except damage control and putting your servers back up one by one.
What I don't understand is this. Somebody out there with real coding and sysadmin skills actually takes the time to write the scripts these numbnuts use. Who actually gives these buggers their code?
Just wondering.
ACK
I'm sure he gets plenty already...
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
I'm not ?
Lars -
I hope they can get it up soon. Damn script kiddies.
Umm, I'm pretty sure Governor of Texas is an elected position. Otherwise, I want to know what I was voting for on that ballot.
Kiro5hin is down
Evil Scr1pt k1dd3s must
Pay for what they did.
I agree with all of this except the comments about fluffy grue and spiralx. They were both very good members of the K5 community. Yes, they have both trolled here, which sucks. I'm pretty sure fluffy stopped. Anyway, neither of them, to my knowlege were ever conspiracy-prone types, and overall, these are not the people we should be worrying about. But yes, other than that, hear hear.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
"What part of Gestalt don't you understand?"
I find the whole thing confusing.
*wink*
It's because they let geeks run the site unfettered, they need to get some suits to sit in their big chair and anticipate such things.
Blender And Linux Fan
We should provide whatever help they need and ask. This is an important site..
jonkatz@slashdot.org
You can't crack a box and spoof while doing it. You might clean up the logs once you're in but you're thinking of a different type of attack.
> > Even if anonymous submissions were removed,
> > you'd still have the problem of people
> > registering accounts and posting flames, spam,
> > or what have you.
> Not at all true.
[snip]
> True, even in this case there are ways to get
> around the system, but it requires a lot more
> work for the average spammer.
So is it true or not?
If I wanted to "spam" slashdot, no amount of selective constraints sans the most personal
would be effective.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered from an e-mail
account from someone at his University. It's
amazing what you can do with a packet sniffer.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered from an e-mail
address from a random cracked machine. It's not
like anyone has ever cracked people have ever
violated the security of other systems, in order
to cause havoc on a trendy pseudo-geek site.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered using one of the
free e-mail services from the 9,000,000 offered
in the U.S. and abroad.
1) Banning e-mail suppliers is nonsense
2) It wouldn't work anyway. The world is much bigger than Hotmail.
All of this to supress speech. I thought we've
already determined that just isn't plausible,
or desired.
This is a good example of why moderation is really quite sad.
If I see a penis bird, surely I can tell that a post isn't worth my time to read.
If I browse the post, and it contains ERIC RAYMOND IS A COMMUNIST, I think it's safe to say I don't always bother to read the rest.
If you don't browse at a level to see ACs or the posts of those moderated down, how can you tell if an interesting AC is modded up?
to K5- God bless, and don't cave in. I say, take down anon, block as many abusive subnets as you can find, and strip the box of as many services as you can other than those crucially needed. We really hope you make it through. to the script kiddies who think they are the evil hax0r shit- you're not. I hope k5 posts your IPs and your e-mails if they can find them. Then I might just show you what happens when I take a very loose interpretation of the golden rule. to slashdot- uuh, yall are having big server problems from where I'm sitting...it may just be my crappy ISP, but it is normally no where as bad. Maybe you are suffering a little DoS yourselves. Anyway, keep up your support of kuro, they need it.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I can believe that pissed off /. readers were involved, or the same people that feel it is necessary to mention 'grits' in every post, but given that the creators of /. have *been through this themselves*, it is unimagineable to me that they would be involved.
Their response, and the assistance they are saying they are providing, has been above-and-beyond the call of duty and should be commended, not flamed.
I think it was (un)officially TOS (that other site), but it was firmly tounge through cheek. No animosity that I noticed, ever.
That's exactly what I was saying ("TOS" not withstanding).
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
The trouble is, if a site like ebay, hotmail, or amazon (or even slashdot) is that they have companies making money off of them - and thus, if you try to take them down, you will have a VERY competent and well-paid legal team after your ass. It's much safer to find a site that a lot of people give a lot of emotional, as opposed to financial, investment to, and destroy THAT - you'll piss off nearly as many people (which is really the point, isn't it?), but there's far less of a risk of retribution.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
I am in an opposite position than you are
;)
Perhaps you guys should work together then
/joeyo
2^5
I would hope that the owners of the boxes have at least been warned that their stuff has been cracked.
And that they'd get the damn things fixed.
I've gotten permission denied when trying to load comments.pl.
I've got a page that was blank except for 'this is test content' at http://slashdot.org/.
For a long time several people I know couldn't post because of some invalid formkey error.
I've got 'internal server errors' from the perl scripts that run slashdot while just trying to navigate.
Just now when I tried to reply to your post I had to go back and hit reply again because I couldn't connect to the webserver. In fact just about every other web-request I'm sending to slashdot is failing right now. I just had to try to load a page four times. And I'm relatively sure it's not my net connection. My net connection is behaving very nicely right now.
What I'm saying is that I agree with reverand, just a note that says 'yes we know there was a problem and we've addressed it'.
Or even better..how about a slashdot status slashbox? Even if stuff is broken we'll have the satisfaction of knowing it's being addressed.
Wait, I've got a perfect solution. Instead of Andover giving hardware to k5, perhaps Andover should give more hardware to rob & co so they can *test* code before running it live on the server.
Or if they already have that hardware, they should use it.
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Clear, Dark Skies
They have exactly what you need.
DNA just wants to be free...
This is actually a great idea, but maybe we should have donations for a reward be managed by Rusty?
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Clear, Dark Skies
this is a fixed version of my horribly screwed up last post, sorry for that--
==============================================
to K5- God bless, and don't cave in. I say, take down anon, block as many abusive subnets as you can find, and strip the box of as many services as you can other than those crucially needed. We really hope you make it through.
to the script kiddies who think they are the evil hax0r shit- you're not. I hope k5 posts your IPs and your e-mails if they can find them. Then I might just show you what happens when I take a very loose interpretation of the golden rule.
to slashdot- uuh, yall are having big server problems from where I'm sitting...it may just be my crappy ISP, but it is normally no where as bad. Maybe you are suffering a little DoS yourselves. Anyway, keep up your support of kuro, they need it.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I enjoy the trolls as much as the next embittered old-timer, so if so, good job. (Although, IIRC this was in the era before trolling became really popular. Pre-moderation, maybe.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
But, it's not a bug that took kuro5hin down. Everything that was used in the spamming of kuro5hin was coded into kuro5hin intentionally.
ie: open story submission, anonymous posting...
Thanks!
"The 85 I fear they don't got a clue."
I've had the same "wee hours of the morning" problem often myself and I wonder if it might not be the name servers instead of Slashdot itself.
http://64.28.67.48/ seems to get through a lot sooner than waiting for some machine to search a database to see what number corresponds with Slashdot.org. When Slashdot acts like it's not there in the middle of the night it's usually when I try to load a link with the name in it, not the number.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
[I shouldn't grace you crap with a response, but this is just too stupid.]
Look, troll, all you've done is make lame, conspiracy theorist accusations, and spewed senseless abuse when a real, logged in, user called you on your baloney.
Don't whine about the signal to noise ratio when all you've done is post meaningless, insulting, idiotic noise!! You are obviously not part of the solution, either here (s/n) or on Kuro5hin (helping them do a comeback), and definitely part of the problem.
Let me weave a real conspiracy theory around this: /. and Kuro5hin so that /. won't help K5, or K5 won't accept it. The only person who would have a motive to do such a thing would be script kiddie that DoS'd K5, or a co-conspirator. By your own brand of screwball logic, YOU are conspiring against both K5 and /.!!!
One wonders if you are trying to sow dissention between
Pot, Kettle, Black, Mr AC. You wouldn't last a day on Usenet. Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of. Even alt.conspiracy would chew you up and spit you out.
use Sig::Witty;
his story on masturbation
{blush}
You don't happen to have that link, do you?
It's not for me. It's for a friend.
InitZero
Maybe, had I interpreted it the way you did, I wouldn't have been so harsh, but the fact still remains. JonKatz is always advocating geeks to act rather than sit on their asses (Take "Shut down Metallica, not Napster" by JK). JK is usually extremely verbose. Why doesn't he give some suggestions as to how we can help K5 or what he's doing to help?
I think we both have points here. I apologize that I may have misinterpreted his original post. If I had read it differently, I wouldn't have been so harsh, but I'd still raise the same point.
kwsNI
Just think Ren and Stimpy "Log". Record. Emulate the professionals. Track. Plod. For future reference most of these attacks can be trapped by simple rerouting toward honeypot systems and careful flood planning redirecting specified traffic. Consider your arse kicked. Damn well contact the flooding-domain providers and insist on source address-spoof protection as default behaviour. Contact your access providers to see if they can filter or provide feedback/further logs. You have time - let the guy hang himself. RTFM. Post the progress. Enjoy the vacation. Bring back some balls.
I was in a great mood yesterday until this happened. I'd just had my first story ever accepted by Slashdot (The Interbase one), I had an interesting job interview, and then K5 goes down.
I read K5 more than Slashdot these days, and post a lot more on there. I try and submit a story or two a week, and I have great fun there.
I had this great book review (of "The Forever War" by Jon Haldeman - great book, possibly the best '70s Hard SciFi I've ever read) half typed up. I log on, and I saw the submission queue with 25 entries. I think "Oh shit.. They are trolling K5" - sure enough, that's what it was.
Why would someone do this? I never understood people doing it on Slashdot, either. Once in a while, a good hand written troll is funny because of the reaction, but script-trolling? Why? Everyone knows you can do it - there is no challenge.
Anyway. I'm going to do something about it. I'm offering a $200 reward (that's Australian $s) in the event of someone turing the K5 troll in, and successful legal action being taken.
Sure, it's not a huge amount, but I hope a few others will do the same, and we'll see what happens. Yes, I'm serious.
I wouldn't have made the request if the pricing and quality weren't competitive -- they were and are.
D
----
The person(s) who did this cracked a lot of boxen to launch this attack, from what I understand. Just because they've been stopped from slamming Kuro5in doesn't mean the threat's over. What might they launch next from these systems? What other systems have they infiltrated? It could turn out to be far, far bigger than this.
I just "discovered" Kuro5hin about 2 weeks ago, and was finally getting into it. Damn those bastards. Damn them to hell. Maybe we'll see them burning with Satan in tonight's South Park.
You can't spoof the IP in a two-way communication (like desktop.evilcracker.org telneting or whatever to helpless.victim.net). You can spoof the MAC in an ethernet header. IP headers wont contain the MAC, though. So there will be reliable IPs that can be tracked back toward the cracker from the boxes that were used for this. Of course, tracking the trail all the way back to a person at a keyboard is the trick.
itachi
you have a good point.. for some reason, i was going under the assumption that these guys would like to be on the nightly news. i guess if just knowing in your heart that you pissed a bunch of people off is what you're after, k5 is a good place to go.
some people out there just like to hurt other people. those people are pretty sick.
wish
---
No. Spammers are those who send out Unsolicited Commercial Email. Hence CAUCE
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
So Rusty, if you're reading this...
Are you interested in cash donations like this? Or will they cause legal headaches, bureacracy, etc...etc...? Say the word and I'll send some your way (via PayPal).
Oxryly
The server would still choke processing the data. Even if it's discarding the posts, they would still be walking the wire with the data. If you read the article, what they were having to do, is monitor the incoming stuff, and see where it was originatiing. Then connect to the router and block the IP address there.
Even then, the pipe between your router, and the internet can be clogged, depending on how fat it is. I suppose it could be theoretically scripted so that it monitors incoming traffic at the server, and when it has a suspected spam attack happening, it logs into the router, and blocks the address or subnet the the attack is originating from. I'd be a little squeamish about my webserver having that kind of control over my router tho.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
> There are valid uses for this as well
> (improving Scoop comes to mind)
Excuse me, why bother to write this program, why not improve scoop by contributing fixes (I haven't checked, but I guess it (Scoop) is open source...)
It was merely a poke at the average clue-level of college graduates and the assumption that if you are a college graduate that you must be a smart person.
Are you interested in cash donations like this? Or will they cause legal headaches, bureacracy, etc...etc...?
Why shouldn't he be? I am not a lawyer (IANAL), but my understanding is that you (as an individual) can give up to $10,000 per year (per person) as a gift, tax-free (to the recipient). I'm sure this qualifies. Whether it's called a "gift" or "donation" amounts to the same thing: I gave him money, and he can do what he wants with it. (I suggested he use it to go see a good movie!)
Now, if people wanted to make donations that would be tax-deductible, and be certain the money would be used for the benefit of Kuro5hin.org (e.g. for server hardware), that would probably require them to setup a legal non-profit entity to make the donations to. That would be more complicated, obviously. Since I didn't care what use he made of the money and I don't intend to deduct it from my taxes, it's probably more accurate to call it a "gift" rather than a "donation" from a legal standpoint...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Soon, we would see newspapers and ignorant print media lamenting about "hackers" launching dos attacks against sites who support open speech and even get away with a couple of snide remarks on how these sites were in turn lauding hackers and blah..blah..blah.
I wish this guys would identify those script kiddies and wipe the floor with their ass. I was looking at the "Know thy enemy" article on rootprompt.org and its quite interesting to see the type of people who does this, and who profess to be hackers. I could imagine "nothing to do" 14 yr old kids, morons who have no better job to do, and people who are trying to prove to the world that they could make an impact on this economy and the internet that fosters it, by bringing it down. Though I would respect the meticulous manner in which some of these attacks are organised, I would definitely love to see them go down. It doesnt make the world a better place, coz there would be still a lot of them out there and you could only do so much.
Slashdot for one, need to make a clear definition as to whats right and whats wrong. If we tell the future generations that pirating is ok, trading pirated software is ok, then theres nothing stopping them from resorting to dos attacks like this, just because they believe what they do is true. This is a never ending question and theres no clear cut answer as to whats right or wrong. The line is thin and it borders on the consciousness of us human beings. Most of the times, we are so hard to identify whats right or wrong. Whats right ? Is trading pirated software right thing to do ? Is napster evil ? Or is it the Music Industry who is licking their fingers ? Who is the winner and whos the loser ? There are no clear rules in this game. As long as there are people who believe that the laws of the land doesnt apply to them, and they could do what they please, we would see more of this. And if they are careful enough to cover their tracks, like anonymous cowards, they would keep on doing it. But the question that begs attention is, are we right in condemning them ? Are we better off than these script kiddies ??
This is not a flame Bait. I wish we could all debate on this.
Rapid Nirvana
I'd buy one of these (with that logo) if I knew it was going to go towards helping Kuro5hin (and that there was some way to get it to the UK).
Do you suppose it was some sort of SuitJihad against the people running the site not having suits on there? ;)
For more info on the Jihad, visit http://normad.webhostme.com/jihad.asp
I got a bitch of a solution. Post the IPs of the cracked boxes and the server logs. Time for some vigilante justice... slashdot-style
I hope you were kidding.
How will attacking the thirdparty, cracked boxes help at all?
If anything, the list you mention should be sent to the owners of the cracked boxes,
so they can close them down and thus disallow the spammer access to this resource.
While your willingness to help is admirable, you may want to rethink your methodology.
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
So then we're back to my original question, which is why? And it's a question for the developer of the perl script too, because why would you write a script that will do this if not as POC? Now instead of writing POC, you're talking about writing a piece of code that will do nothing but aid you in being a jerk...
itachi
I would have to say it reflects well on Commander Taco and VA Linux Systems that they were able to be helpful to a competitor. Apparently CT gave lots of advice (which I am sure drew on copious experience) to the fledgeling K5 admins, and now VA is giving them hardware (which is totally unexpected I am sure)!
Looks like those who would say VA/Andover/CT//. are biased, sold out corporate shells, or otherwise not part of us as a community are dead wrong. Maybe CT will write an Oreilly published "Successful Web-Based Comment Messaging Systems in a Nutshell" Of course John Katz would feel compelled to vie for the chance to write the Foreword...
OK. So what's a LART?
Last I knew:
Luser
Attitude
Readjustment
Tool
Otherwise known as a "Clue-by-Four", or just a big, heavy stick!!
HTH, HAND
use Sig::Witty;
Excuse my ignorance. So if you wanted to prevent such attacks couldn't you require someone making a new user or posting as an AC to enter a randomly generated word back into a field. Two way communication must exist, so they can't hide forever. I suppose they could spoof the ip to another comprimised box and listen for the word there. If your page is limiting to one AC post/new user per IP per day then you will only have 1 spam per comprimised box.
Am I missing something?
I don't think this will happen. Rusty's very clear about his policy - he simply deletes spam/troll posts. And he deletes accounts, too, on the second offense (the first just gets you a warning). And now he's banning anonymous access. This by itself ups the ante for the troll brigade, and it doesn't account for any additional safeguards on how accounts are acquired (waiting period, email/IP address duplication, and the like).
Basically, Kuro5hin is a benevolent dictatorship, being run in the form of a democracy just because the dictators like the idea. And you know what? It's rather refreshing.
ACs are very important to discussions. There are several times ACs have made insightful and informative posts that they wouldn't have otherwise made because they didn't want to reveal their identity, suffer the potential damage to karma, etc.
I support Anonymous Posting for this. The trolls are moderated down anyway.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Unless you are refering to the one time event known as the DDOS attack on Slashdot...
I suggest you check out your traffic...
You may be the victom of a flaky server. Not Slashdots server... (Why dose it automaticly have to be Slashdot?)
Do a traceroute and see where the traffic stops.
You may find a router who isn't responding...
I had that a lot on my former ISP. Not anymore.
Slashdot is remarkably stable considering it's daily load.
I don't actually exist.
lazy people everywhere....UNITE!
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
I have sympathy for k5 but as someone once said, defending the rights of people you agree with is easy. So next time someone launches attacks on Amazon, or some other geek-unfriendly site let's hear no more - "they're paid to handle this sort of thing" crap.
Considering what others have said on the subject of Script Kiddie Psychology, it figures that these kids would attack those in a position to make compare favourably to them.
It struck me that this point of view is essentially identical to that of the schoolyard bully who picks on smart kids, because everyone is always telling him he's not smart (for example).
Still, I find it strange that these kids would want to attack someone who may be a fellow IT peer a few years down the track. All depends on who you feel most threatened by, no? The schoolyard bully sees more threat in the nonviolent academic kids than in the schoolyard principal.
Anyway, I don't want to start generalizing. I am only talking about this particular instance of the scriptkiddies.
--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Well actually you can spoof by using compromised machines in the middle of the connection. If I know that somerouter.example.com forwards traffic to somemachine.someothernet.com (or is on a non-switched subnet with a machine that does), I could compromise somerouter and get the packets destined for somemachine. This would also be true if I had legitimate control over somerouter.
What makes this interesting is that the spammer will be in much greater legal peril for compromising so many machines than anything related to the actual spam.
> About 20 minutes ago I couldn't hit this story for about 10 minutes.
Check your equipment and do a traceroute...
This sounds like your reaching Slashdot vea a defective router.
I don't actually exist.
Ok sorry for the rant everyone. ;) Hm, I'm doing too many of those lately... Anyway. I guess this probably deserves to be modded Troll or Offtopic or Flamebait.. As you see fit. Had to spew. ;)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Something to the effect of:
Script kiddies taste like chicken
With some huge (read fat) linux gurus eating a kid on a spit with a T-Shirt that says 1337!!! or some other 1337 thing...
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
How can you know you don't like it before you read it, heh?
I think that's one of the nice aspects of moderation, if an anonymous person posts something interesting, it's usually modded up.
Just my .02
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
Nah, maybe later...
"The 85 I fear they don't got a clue."
Puh'leeze... we're out here
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
We have an Arrowpoint load balancing switch in the front of six web servers and whenever a web server stops responding the load balancer stops passing requests to it, but it make take a minute or so for the load balancer to actually take that machine out of rotation. It's not perfect and we're always tweaking it. I workaround it by hitting reload and that usually randomly hits the "next" web server.
K5 Troll || Beware the blackhole
This is obvoiusly the software that is being used to do this, If anybody wants the annonuncement it was posted on sid=slashcode, this seriously angers me, that someone should take it to this extent, I admit i've done crap to slashdot but seeing what I can do i've stopped developing sTs and put an explaination why on slashtroll.tripod.com
It pisses me off that someone should take a whole website down
Hey, we're a community, right? And aren't community members supposed to help each other out in times of need?
Indeed.
This will be a good time to show others how a community operates. Let's all please take this situation seriously and set new precedents of community support and development. The trick will be to somehow not inflate the awkward egos of the little weaners who brought down the site while at the same time demonstrating that perhaps being a script kiddie isn't the safest, anonymous thing it appears to be and that the broader community is stronger than this.
"Man has always been his own most vexing problem." --Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Nature and Destiny of Man"
You could keep the moderators busy, but the key difference here was the open submission policy. Slashdot has moderated submissions.
As for DoS, everyone is vulnerable, but a single ageing box is probably less of a challenge than most.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
JK is not AFAIK helping k5 directly, but then his strengths are said to be in journalism and commentary, not network security. However CT helped the K5 crew considerably with technical advice, and VA is sending them hardware, so his "colleagues" are doing quite a bit considering K5 is basically a competitor.
W0W... you can count. An extra two years makes something "OLDER!!!"
"And lame-o was your name-o!"
-sid
Yeah everyone knows that Governors in Texas are chosen by rodeo. Whatever.
Personally, I think we should find the kid who did this and take away all his .jpgs of Natalie Portman and hot grits.
Just my $.02
Or the cracker can crack k5 and watch at the same time.. I mean it was just a script anyway..
Honestly, get a clue. No one needs to beat on the cracked boxes anymore, someone needs to fix them. The same goes for the cracker's IP, the more we do to him, the more we sink to his level. Honestly, that's the Feds' job : P
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
I didn't say that this was _the_best_ way to improve scoop.
But that doesn't really matter. It's fairly obvious that this person didn't write the code to help scoop out.
Maybe I shouldn't have written that part, but the point I was trying to make, is that this is just code. It's up to the attacker to use it. And while we are probably a little angry with this guy right now I don't really see the point in blaming him.
Just my thoughts.
not anymore
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I was greatly saddened to see the site go down. When you pour blood sweat and tears into a project just to see it screwed up by someone who needs to get a life it's a sickening sensation. I'm glad to hear that you're willing to give it another try.
When it comes to the internet, the saying 'one bad apple ruins the whole bunch' really applies. What's the point? If your site gets popular enough to attract attention someone little bastard kid will just f*ck it all up.
I just wish that there was something that the hacker community could do to curb the script kiddie mentality. I mean, they are just kiddies. Used to be that we'd teach them a lesson and they'd shut up. Maybe an organization of white caps dedicated to securing up boxes with or without the admins permission? Or an ORBS style blacklist of known comprimised boxes? Maybe a bit radical, just a thought.
Anyway, good luck and keep it up. I'm all for turning off anony, you don't need ACs anyway.
... this DoS attack might be the best thing for them (K5). I mean they get great exposure, new VA hardware, and lots of sympathy support. I'm not trying to sound like a bad guy, but wouldn't it be funny if this was intentional. Nah, I don't think so, but it would be funny if...
Last time I wrote to him, his email address was rusty@kuro5hin.org
This is exactly why I'm proud to be a VA Linux customer. I got my company to invest in a dual PIII/700 system with RAID and 1GB RAM, and it's worked perfectly, without flaw. I'd warmly endorse them any day of the week, for that and the excellent support they give back to the Linux community.
D
----
K5 Troll Developer
I will gladly accept donations on behalf of k5.
j/k
On a serious note, I want to reiterate that it's great to see everyone rallying together like this. Where exactly are the k5 staff located? That information may help out in letting you know what we can do to help. If you're in the Chicago area, I know a great bunch that would love to assist you guys. Since you aren't necessarily going to be able to go through all your mail, I thought it would be an idea to post that here.
Dissenter
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
Reading this, though, has made my day. I look forward to the day when I will be reading both Slashdot and K5 again.
Again, thanks to the Slashdot crew!
hehe, all over. canada, silicon valley, and davis, CA. are where inoshir, rusty, and I are. not much is done for it in meatspace
Slashdot and kuro5hin were at war - the only people who believed this were the pathetic slashdot trolls like spiralx and fluffy grue(who wants DDoSed slashdot) who were always pushing the conspiracy theory edge.
Not to put too fine a word on it, but bollocks. I've never believed /. and k5 were at war or even in competition, its obviously not the case to anyone with half a clue about either site. A few sly jokes was about the most it ever got to.
I like kuro5hin and I read it every day during the week whilst I'm at work. I don't post that often, but I do when I've got something to say. I haven't trolled k5 and I won't troll k5, because it simply doesn't have the knee-jerk crowd /. has.
You need to calm down and stop throwing blame around. I don't think anyone really thinks /. attacked kuro5hin.
Whoops, scoop.kuro5hin.org seems to be down right now, not surprisingly. You can still the Scoop project on sourceforge, though.
Well, you obviously dont have the skills to use the preview button first...even when you're reminded every time you post.
Why is there only one Monopolies commission?
If it would help at all to have an active web domain for the community, I'd gladly put www.OpticalValley.com back online.
I don't have the skillz to create a community posting board, or anything close to what slashdot or k5 is like, but I'm sure that there are many volunteers out there that would be willing to help out in this area.
Anyone want to help out?
Here's The Deal
I'll provide the domain OpticalValley.com if people want to code a community postboard.
Let me know what you all think.
-Chris Simmons
www.peitourism.com
a better sig would normally be here. -blah-
This is as much about getting a big reaction as it is destruction or revenge. Probably more. Look at all of this discusion and hub-bub (to which I am now contributing). Someone can point to this and say 'wow, I just got so many people really worked up, i am p0WarFul'. At least they're not throwing rocks off overpasses.
I stopped writing slogans on my notebooks in high school, now I need to come up with a sig....
But most of these problems I see in the middle of the night (eastern time2 or 3 am). You have to wonder then because you KNOW they aren't getting nearly as many hits as they are getting at 11 or 12 am.
;-)
Remember that 2-3am EST is about about 7-8am GMT which is about when most of us on the west bit of Europe are doing our pre-work coffe + slashdot + theregister.co.uk, even more so when you consider we're in daylight saving time at the moment so it's actually 8-9am BST. I know, pedantic, but it's a good reason as to why it's like that - plus if you're reading it at 2am EST, then just think of all the other people out there that are as well.
--
Rusty pulled K5 "because I didn't want my name associated with what was showing up on the site". The issue was discriminating signal from noise. At a certain point, things reached the level of crashing scoop.k5.org, but this wasn't the initial or principle problem.
The problem is that IP-based blocking only works against finite IPs. In this case, the attacks were coming from a relatively small number of sites, but things kept escalating beyond the ability of the K5 volunteer staff to deal with them.
Yes, chokepoint DoS is a possible attack, but the weblog was choking on poor quality data long before that.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Even if anonymous submissions were removed, you'd still have the problem of people registering accounts and posting flames, spam, or what have you. This tends to be fairly common now, so I don't imagine it'll do anything but increase.
Personally I browse at -1, because I find the moderation system to be pointless elitism.
If someone posts something I don't like, I don't read it.
I tjust proves that if you don't have a reason for how I act then it's not
. Taco is better than most, but he's still not perfect.
:)
/.
/. was somehow responsible for what happened to Kuro5hin --- which I see no evidence for, and which strikes me as being irresponsible attacks against people whose actions indicate that, by and large, they are on the 'right' side of things.
Sure --- and expecting perfection from anyone is religious.
This whole Open Source movement is about openness and doing what's right for the community even when it's not convenient. I believe in that, and I think Taco still does too, in spite of everything.
So do I --- the only reason i'm still willing to read
My gripe with this thread is that there are noises going around that
According to you, you have the skills and I don't!
Ok, now I probably shouldn't get myself into this, but aren't you effectively doing the same sort of thing that happened to Kuro5hin? I mean, here we have a poster you don't like. That's fine. Perhaps there's something not to like. But it sounds to me that you're subverting the moderation scheme beyond what it is intend to me to pursue a personal vendetta. Is that really any different from people subverting the internet to pursue personal vendettas?
If a post is overrated, yeah, moderate it overrated. But don't decide that just because you don't like a poster, the rest of us should have to wade through whiny complaints or miss posts moderated purely for dickish motives.
The internet would be a much better place if people would just take a fucking pill and chill out. And that includes both the people with the anti-Kuro5hin vendetta and a lot of Slashdot posters.
All the complaints about karma-whoring are far more annoying than the karma-whoring is in the first place.
The cake is a pie
It's been my experience that whenever someone incorrectly claims another person is in school (and implies it's H.S. or earlier), that person is, himself a High Schooler.
Either that or you have absolutely no ability for an original insult, and no ability to debate your own stance.
The source of a proposition is irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of that proposition.
This is not true. The source of a statement of fact is irrelevent to the truth or falsehood of that statement. You, however, are making no such statement.
This is a fact. This is how logic works. I know that you don't understand that fact, and I sympathize: You're young, and school is hard for somebody like you.
Was this a deliberate drop for the obvious grammar flame?
However, the reliability of an UNSUPPORTEDaccusation is directly tied to the source of an accusation. Where are the objective facts supporting your accusation? That's right... You have none. Your only support is that K5 is "competition" for Slashdot, despite Slashdot's maintainers disagreeing with you.
For now, just repeat after me: If somebody with a nick says the sky is green, and an AC says it's blue, the guy with the nick is still a moron and the AC is still right, regardless of which statement is associated with which name.
You ever been to L.A.? I've seen what can only be called a "green sky" there. Yes, I get the point you're trying to make, too bad it's irrelevent.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
It is sad enough that one of the most interesting online discussions I've had in a while has been lost due to kuro5hin going down but now to see people cheapen the memory of the site in a CHEAP attempt to karma whore and seem deep is just too disgusting for words.
To all the idiots who think slashdot had something to do with this I'd like you to consider your words in this light...
- Slashdot and kuro5hin were at war - the only people who believed this were the pathetic slashdot trolls like spiralx and fluffy grue(who wants DDoSed slashdot) who were always pushing the conspiracy theory edge.
- Micheal has posted to kuro5hin several times and the other slashdot authors read it as well. CmdrTaco offered rusty help and gave advice on how to deal with the DDoS attempts several times. The only people who have ever believed they are at war are the small-minded people who can not like two things at once, who must always believe something has to be one "hip", "cool" or "in thing to do or like. These people have been spreading disinformation, malice and discord simply bnecause they have nothing beter to do with their time. They are quite similar to the "Redhat wants to be the Linux monopoly" idiots but only this time, they are posting their drivel at an innoportune moment.
Frankly this entire affair has deeply shaken my faith in human nature. There I was thinking that online I'd find a community of like-minded intellectuals who I could share and discuss ideas with that I couldn't find In Real Life. Instead one community turns out to be as full of petty, small-minded individuals as my hated highschool was while the other has probably been destroyed forever by some immature individual because his story on masturbation was rejected by the community.I gotta go I've got a Physics test in an hour. I will say this though, if anyone wants to start another kuro5hin and needs an extra pair of hands mail me.
What does anyone stand to gain by taking down K5? It's not like they make huge boasts about their security, or, god forbid, actually make money for what they do. Even trying to look from a cracker's point of view, I can't see where the thrill is. Honestly, go after more interesting and more evil targets, like eToys, or something like that.
Now that I think about it, the person(s) who did this seem a lot like school yard bullies, who have to pick on the weakest to make themselves feel better. It is very pathetic.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
It was ten o'clock, and we went to watch The Simpsons. While we watched, the guy had just been spamming the server more. he started spamming about fifteen minutes after we went to watch The Simpsons. How could someone do this?
Damn right! Doesn't this cracker have any sense of cultural literacy? I bet he watches the Home Shopping Network for fun.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It's that simple. Where is your evidence that the Slashdot maintainers are behind, or in any way supportive, of the action of the script kiddie?
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
All the boxes used were cracked...gotta contact the owners of those boxes who are prolly cowering in fear right now.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Bear in mind that I am not trying to flame slashdot, obviously I like it or I wouldn't read it. But most of these problems I see in the middle of the night (eastern time2 or 3 am). You have to wonder then because you KNOW they aren't getting nearly as many hits as they are getting at 11 or 12 am. That's all. I do love /. and if I was a coder I would contribute, but I'm not so I suggest instead.
And true /. is not in the same league as Yahoo, but I consider it to be a lot larger than my friend from colleges site, and they have a LOT of money and major corporate backing.
Just my opinion mind you.
Marc
All the boxes used were cracked...gotta contact the owners of those boxes who are prolly cowering in fear right now.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Don't you people have a sense of humor anymore? christ.
We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I have a fair amount of connection problems at work -- it's like somebody's rebooting the box, because it seems to come back with 5 minutes or so. I remember hearing that they were running a load-balancer in front. I wonder if either its flaking or they're screwing around behind the balancer and that's what's killing me..
Get a life man; the guy was only floating a theory. I actually was entertained by reading it. If you don't like what he said, tell him why he's wrong. While his posts contained nothing but baseless conspiracy theories, yours contained nothing but insults.
And you don't see me hiding behind an AC name. Of course, I'm 12 hours late, but...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You choose the stories at kuro5hin.org
hrm... not anymore...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Even Slashdot readers don't always evaluate a system (Slashdot, Gnome, whatever) based solely on its current quality as they perhaps should. They take into effect all the crap the system has given them in the past as well. I was doing that until I started thinking about your post and came to the conclusion that, yeah, Slashdot has been pretty stable lately. A little slow sometimes, as you say, but it's been a while since I've noticed any downtime. Also, people just seem to magnify problems in their heads. I've gotten a few bug reports like "Lots of problems with $feature, for instance $bug". I fix the bug and ask what other problems they were talking about. Usually there were none.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
is now a troll.
We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
but you can jump into the IRC chat on irc.kuro5hin.org, channel #kuro5hin. See you there!
Of course, with /., we don't know what goes on in the sub queue, or if/when it's being attacked. It would be interesting to know about this, though there is the copycat problem associated with asking the question.
And I've got to say, /.'s been a great friend of K5 today, shout out to VA as well. Thanks, people. The world may not be perfect, but parts of it are excellent.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
But here's how I see it, /. is on hardcore equipment, and pays people to run it. If I ran a server (NT jokes aside) that was this unreliable I would be fired in about a week.
How about the odd story that at least tells us what is going on. Just throw something in the quickies like Hey we had some problems due to a mySQL misconfig, here's what happened and why. Not only would this satisfy a lot of us /bitchers, but it may provide a learning experience for all of us using similar tools.
One problem with not allowing free webmail addresses is that not everyone has a real email address. And even those who do might not always be able to read email to that address (damn hardware) even though they might have usable web connection.
Eg. in Finland You can use computers at libraries for net connection. And use hotmail or whatever for email. Not everyone has internet connection at home or at work. And these people may very well be excellent participants in public and semi-public forums.
Also, it's easy to get email addresses. Just register a domain (any domain) and have them forward all email to anything@your.domain to you@hotmail.com or whatever.
Or use a less well known free email system.
corrosion.
We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What did kevin take down?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Um, do you have a cite for this? I've scoured every resource I can lay my hands on, and I can't find a whisper about any such incident. Could you favor us with a reference, please?
:-)
New York Times, June 17, 2000 by John Tierney. Sorry, but I didn't feel like dropping $2.50 to get the article for you
I'm betting that there was more involved than a little following and filming.
My impression is that there was a lot of following and filming. I might have gotten a restraining order. But if you make a living stalking people with cameras, it seems to me you ought to be able to take it. The reporter interviewed the female staffers who were allegedly endangered and they said the guy was harmless.
As far as the other responses:
Umm. I don't think Ben Franklin ever held an elected position. Then again, Dubya hasn't either.
I know Ben Franklin is famous for unelected positions (postmaster, ambassador). I believe he was elected to the Continental Congress, though. Even if I'm wrong, I think the Dubya asertion makes us even.
And an obnoxious AC also raises the Franklin issue, plus
"Voting" means something. Your vote means nothing.
Of course my vote means something. It means the same as everyone else's vote. Those 40 million votes you're so upset about are 40 million individuals whose "vote means nothing."
That's what so got under my skin in the first place. Moore has complete contempt for democracy and diversity of opinion. People who don't vote are heroes and then if they vote for Ralph Nader, they're Molotov cocktails! KABOOM! But anyone who votes for Moore he doesn't like is either a sheep or whore.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why did we think public-comment websites would be substantially different from Usenet? The only real social diff here is that Usenet has a much bigger group of volunteers trying to keep it working (cancelbots, etc.). It seems like the experiments in trust-based submission networks haven't given use the best answer yet.
I feel really bad for Kuri5hin. But as a denizen of one of the hotter parts of Usenet for the last decade, it is all eerily familiar, and in these web-spaces there are no killfiles to adjust.
Unless some of you sniveling cowards can prove me wrong, and tell me why Anonymous Cowards should remain.
Here you go
We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The only people who use anonymous features both on K5 and /. are what /. calls them, cowards. All anonymous cowards here have nothing important to say...unless they're trolling or flaming....."
Interesting...its been mentioned here in other articles about how people need to take responsibility for their actions online, much the same as in real life. I personally think ACs should *not* have a voice, I mean lets get real here, the Internet may be *mostly* American, but it is not *completely* American. Applying American values/morals/Constitutional dribble to a global community is short sighted, not to mention Ameri-centric. Guess what, America is *not* the center of the world, contrary to popular belief. With that said, I submit to the Slashdot Management: remove the AC access. Its not about "Free Speech", its about taking responsibility for ones self online. If a person has something to say, they can say it as an identified person. This would not only cut down on the number of trolls, but would raise the IQ level of the comments in general.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be AC-type speech online in general, there are newsgroups, and other forums, where anonymous posts are preferred for both security and personal issues, usually but not limited to, recovery from some type of traumatic experience. Slashdot is not one of these forums.
Once again, I implore the Slashdot Management to drop AC access.
It really is complicated to think about the best methods of moderation compared to traffic levels. I've got a creative writing site that makes group-created cyoa books - right now it's low-traffic enough that I don't need any of these techniques, but I've thought a lot about how to increase it with popularity. The best idea I've had so far is a sort of clustering approach where people vouch for each other - popularity combined with there being an "in" crowd - but that feels a bit complicated to implement for someone who doesn't have a CS degree like myself.
Looking forward to next month when they come live again...
tune
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Errr...make that: But anyone who votes for someone Moore doesn't like is either a sheep or whore.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Breakfast Cereal Contamination Alert!
Read this if you or your kids eat General Mills breakfast cereal.
Deven scoped it out. Open an account at paypal.com ($5 bonus for new users!) and have money sent to rusty@intes.net. You can pay with a credit card or have money transferred from your bank account (slower).
Even if anonymous submissions were removed, you'd still have the problem of people registering accounts and posting flames, spam, or what have you. This tends to be fairly common now, so I don't imagine it'll do anything but increase.
Not at all true. Other web based forums rely upon a valid E-Mail address that the user must be able to reply from in order to register. One that I know of that remains quite busy has the additional restriction of not allowing you to use free services, such as hotmail or yahoo. With such a system in place, you can actually make those bans stick.
True, even in this case there are ways to get around the system, but it requires a lot more work for the average spammer.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
ACs are very important to discussions. There are several times ACs have made insightful and informative posts that they wouldn't have otherwise made because they didn't want to reveal their identity, suffer the potential damage to karma, etc.
Bullshit. Someone posts this lame excuse every time the topic comes up. Come on, go through the exstensive
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Who does exodus peer with in Chicago? Their map just says "public peering point" (which I'd assume is the Chicago NAP) and two private interconnects. My ISP, Onvoy, peers with Sprint, UUNet, Above, C&W, BBN-GTE yet my traffic to /. goes to Chi and NYC on Sprint before it hands off to Exodus. Maybe I could shave 2 seconds off of reload times if they peered in Chicago...
Of all people, I wouldn't expect you to be one to say: We should do something. If there's anything that's consistent in your articles, it's that you advocate action, even if what you don't succeed. You've always been one to stand up and do something if you believe in it. I'm pretty disappointed...
kwsNI
Hey, we're a community, right? And aren't community members supposed to help each other out in times of need?
Absolutely. This is what we need to be seeing. I am personally going through some pretty tough times, and it has been the support and assistance of my friends and my community which brought me through it. I am not a K5 reader, but it made my blood boil to hear about how someone tore them down.
I'm especially impressed that VA Linux is donating machinery to help. This is a time when we have to help one another out. So that, a year from now, the script kiddie is in jail or paying off a fine, while K5 is as strong as ever.
Blogs and discussion sites give people tremendous freedom. But things like this are a reminder that unless exercised responsibly, freedom is short lived. Sites which are constantly abused end up, if they survive at all, locked down, restricted and paranoid.
Anyway, for all those who can't wait, basically, I appreciate all your support a whole lot. A bunch of people have offered various things, from hardware to bandwidth to security services, and they are all appreciated. I'm just trying to get on top of the whole situation right now, but I will get back to everyone who wrote. This community rocks, and is the reason I'm "bitter and hopeful" now rather than bitter and depressed. Thanks all.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
k5 and /. were never enemies. Its some sort of rumor. Don't spread it any more. /. has given tons of help in getting k5 back up and running, by donating servers and expertise. So /. is a great help. Don't say that there is some feud or that they hate us. they don't.
The IPs are likely spoofed. Isn't the MAC address also in an IP header? Is that spoofable?
That sucks. I liked Kuro5hin. What's weird is www.np2k.com, a Natalie Portman fan site, was being smurfed hardcore yesterday.
What pains me is that the Three Big Weblogs (TBW) have portions of the solution. Slashdot has filtering tools. K5 has a good moderation system. Advogato has a good membership vetting system. However, the pieces need to be put together. Having them on seperate systems doesn't quite cut it.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I'm highly interested in knowing the name of the webhosting farm from which this attack came.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
Actually if /. is going to emulate K5 they should start by banning ACs.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Here: roblimo actually ordered Inoshiro a pizza, bacuse he hasn't eaten yet today. Roblimo's in MD, Inoshiro's in Canada. That, I think, is above and beyond the call of duty. The conspiracy theory is not true, no other discussion is necessary.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
It's like how good friends mock each other and pick on each other, etc. K5 and /. do that. K5 constantly puts up things like "at a certain other discussion site" and so forth.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
There wouldn't have been the need to insult.
He bitches about the "discussion" quality here, yet does exactly the thing he's bitching about.
It was a simple question, and a flame in kind to the insults he was flinging directly at Rob and the /. crew, to which he never replied. The reasonable implication is that he knows it's baseless and posted strictly to impunge /. and its operators.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
How hard can that be to answer?
You're casting unsupported accusations around. Where's your proof? Can I get any clearer?
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Their box wasn't cracked it was a DOS attack, neither MS or A/L have an advantage.
My bad, wasn't trying to offend. When I originally posted this there were several highly moderated posts that were playing up the slashdot vs kuro5hin angle. Such as this one, this one and this one.
Since they've all been moderated down, my post seems weird out of context. There were also several sub-level posts that played this angle up but I don't have time to find links to all of them. Frankly, several people on K5 do try to play up the Slashdot vs. kuro5hin angle more than you do I simply remembered your name and that of fluffy grue. Probably because you both troll or have trolled slashdot.
PS: I like Jon Erikkson, keep it up.
Hell. I hate to see this done to ANY site. Working for hosting facilities for some time, I know what it's like to have these kiddies pull this kind of a stunt. First off, it is a Federal offense to do some bone-headed stunt like DOS or DDOS attacks. Secondly, they have NO idea what it's like as an admin to have to deal with this kind of stunt.
How many of you out there have records? You know EXACTLY how hard it is to get a technical job with one! It's one of those cases where it'd just be better to smoke crack and shoot a little china...
-What have you contributed lately?
You, signal 11, are a total dipshit. Why do the cracked boxes need more cracking? Why does the poor server farm need to be abused anymore? Post the IP's of the cracker, not the cracked boxes.
Jesus dude,... Take it for what it is. I'm still kinda new here, but there seems to be a long-standing tradition of engaging in wild conspiracy mumbo-jumbo, and about 5% of it is actually serious "Frankly this entire affair has deeply shaken my faith in human nature." If you are getting your faith in human nature from a message board, you need to get out, meet some real live human beings and get some sun. This is not meant as an attack, or the start of a flame war, but sometimes people take these things a little too seriously. Natalie Portman sucks.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Unfortunately, it takes more than great code to make a great site. You could have perfect code, incredible features, but if you don't have an active audience and interesting content, your site *will* fail.
I am in an opposite position than you are; I have an audience, I have content, I have a server that can work for the time being, but I have no code. And most of all I lack the experience to prevent attacks like this one on k5 from happening to my site or even the knowledge of what to do if my site were to be attacked. Thus it is a liability for me to put up a site like k5.
I've gone on too long on this tangent, but let me reiterate that it takes both sides of the equation to make a site really work.
I disagree with you on The Forever War being the best '70's science fiction ever written. Have you read Brunner's Schockwave Rider?
Thanks,
George
Cold and empty place
Where kuro5hin used to be.
Fuck you, skr1pt k1ddi3z.
(Can one say fuck in haiku? I hope so...)
--
The idea is more to put the fear of being caught into the mind of the troll.
I'm really, really serious about the reward. I will pay it, and I will consider paying some/most of it for any infomation leading to getting him at least kicked of his ISP.
"Howdy. I've been reading k5 for a few months now, and I was really getting to enjoy it. Not just the site, but the community of people that read and posted there. Needless to say, I was saddened to find that k5 has been brought down by script kiddies. I'd like to do something to help, but I probably can't offer anything in the way of coding skills that you guys don't already have. Thus, I was wondering if I'd be able to send you guys some sort of monetary donations, to be put towards higher-end hardware or better net connectivity or whatever. The only other person I've talked to about this is interested in donating as well.
Hey, we're a community, right? And aren't community members supposed to help each other out in times of need?"
... it's just that my name seems to have been eternally linked to the concept of Trolling on /. even though spiralx is not a troll account - that's what this is for :)
I don't think anyone really thinks /. and k5 are at war - all three posts you linked were trolls. And I hope k5 gets back up since it was definitely getting some interesting stories recently and I was getting more into reading it.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
This pisses me off. Thanks to these 31337ers, I now have to go a whole month with no kuro5hin. What's sadder, is that kuro5hin is now getting so much publicity that it'll probably turn into another Slashdot, with firstposters, natalies and penis birds.
On a related note, what's up with Slashdot tonight, it seems slower than ever... Hello, am I reaching?
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
What makes this interesting is that the spammer will be in much greater legal peril for compromising so many machines than anything related to the actual spam.
so it seems that the spammer was either very good or very stupid. I'd guess good, but, whatever. Either way, he was pissed, and angry people make more mistakes.
Good luck finding the guy, I'm curious to see what comes of this. I dunno if they've contacted the feds, but I'm sure they're curious anyway.
--
+&x
In case you are a bit confused at this point, Dylan Griffiths' K5 nick is "Inoshiro", not "Iroshiro". Sorry, Emet. Erm, I mean, Emmett :)
That deserves troll-ness immediately.
Let's see, Malda and Rusty are having discussions about fixing it, VA (owners of Andover and Slashdot) is donating hardware, and the reason they don't have the dorks (you used "penis bird") like you posting is because you shits didn't care to go fuck it up, *YET*.
Oh, given time, you'd get over there and post crap, like the message to which I'm replying, but you hadn't, yet.
Are you just bitter that Malda did Slashdot and you didn't get in on it?
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
I've notice that refresh seems to work. Its been mainly over the last couple weeks. Everything seems to stall and a reload gets it right quick (lightmode, highest, nested, with -1 banished from sight).
--
+&x
I sent a $20 donation to Rusty Foster (Kuro5hin.org's founder) with PayPal using the rusty@intes.net address listed in the WHOIS servers as he contact for kuro5hin.org. He has replied to me in email, so I know he received it. (He replied from rusty@kuroshin.org, which I almost used in the first place.)
Here's the message I included along with the money:Anyone else care to join me, and show that their all-volunteer efforts really are appreciated?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Somewhere, some little spineless geek is laughing. He (I can't imagine a female being such a pain, even among the list of ex-girlfriends of mine) is probably even reading /. to see how well he is doing. He is trying to figure out who he can piss off next.
People like these are the reasons LART's were invented, no? As I tell my friends who do sysadmin work, at any time, I can be a walking, talking, 6'-0", 290 lb. LART.
The sound you are hearing is cracking knuckles . . . not the cracking of vertebrae. Nahhhhh . . . it would just be fun to scare the ever-loving heck out of the guy.
--
<><
-- Geof F. Morris
i don't understand animosity of this sort against k5. as the k5 guys said, it really proves nothing to take down k5.. the scoop software is written with the assumption that the community will make the site what it wants too, and so it allows the things that were exploited. it would be different, though no less moral, if the attackers were exploiting some bug in the software.. but they weren't.. it is just destruction for the sake of destruction.. and if your going to destroy like that, there are many better places to do it.
flood ebay with crappy auctions.. flood amazon with fake orders.. flood hotmail with fake accounts sending gigs of email to each other... i'm not advocating these things, but if you're going to do destruction for destruction's sake, pick something better than k5.
wish
---
Slashdot for one, need to make a clear definition as to whats right and whats wrong.
/. and k5 enjoy? What about unjust laws? What about ambiguous areas of law? Do you really believe that ideas in a discussion forum should be censored solely because they do not fit with your definition of right and wrong?
/.ers are), then nobody will stop you from posting pro-RIAA essays. In fact, if your post is thoughtful and interesting many moderators will moderate you up if only to stimulate an interesting discussion. Most of us who read /. and k5 are quite capable of making moral and ethical decisions for ourselves and we are in little need of sanctimonious censors.
/. as a single entity with a single voice is inaccurate. A better characterization is one of a community of people with a shared interest in a collection of related topics. While many attitudes are shared by a plurality or even a majority of /.ers ("Microsoft sucks," "The Matrix was a fun, if silly, movie," "Jon Katz makes up too many new words."), opposing opinions can always be found within the Slashdot community. (Well, perhaps not with the Jon Katz word-coining issue).
Are you volunteering to lead this crew of Thought Police? What criteria do you propose we use to excise subversive posts--shall we use strict legality according to current U.S. law? What about the international audiences
Part of the charm of Slashdot and k5 is that these sites don't discriminate among its posters' ideas beyond the moderation imposed by its own readers. For example, if you are on the side of the RIAA in the Napster debate (and many
Speaking of
Most of the times, we are so hard to identify whats right or wrong.
That's because most of the time one cannot so narrowly determine the "rightness" of a given idea. Privacy is both right and wrong depending on circumstance and the value system of the one assessing its rightness. Copying software or music is both right and wrong--even the strict U.S. legal definition of "fair use" is a gray area. In fact, the continued existence of nuclear weapons is both right and wrong. (Is keeping an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction necessarily "wrong" if the weapons are never used, if total war is prevented by MAD, and if much human suffering is thereby circumvented?) In my mind the most interesting discussions are those where moral ambiguity arises. If I want someone else to make all these decisions for me, then I can just tune in to Rush Limbaugh.
If the users make the content, then how can it not be interesting? :) (BTW - it's 10,000 lines. I am a moron)
--
Now, poor security shouldn't be tolerated but I'm not going to DoS someone because they were cracked. The only thing those sys admins should get is an e-mail telling them they've been owned.
kwsNI
It's an honest question and your unwillingness to answer it says just how much of a liar and a mud-slinger you are. You have no proof /. is involved and yet you claim they are behind the K5 attacks. WHERE *IS* YOUR PROOF?
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
But here's how I see it, /. is on hardcore equipment, and pays people to run it. If I ran a server (NT jokes aside) that was this unreliable I would be fired in about a week.
How about the odd story that at least tells us what is going on.
Could it be because slashdot is tired of calling attention to the myriad DDoS attacks they get weekly?
When rusty first mentioned the DDoS attacks on kuro5hin, a lot of us suggested not giving the spammer coverage so as not to feed his ego, because we 'd seen how that made slashdot more of a target. I guess we were wrong and that didn't help. Of course, rusty and Inoshiro threatening to contact the law may have also pushed the spammer over the edge.
I know, you're thinking, "but Fox shows Simpsons reruns every hour where I come from", but some backwards affiliates have cut down to showing the Simpsons only 11 (or even as few as 6!) times per week.
So don't be silly; the cracker was probably working from another timezone where the Simpsons had already ended or hadn't yet begun. I mean, just because he's an immature criminal vandal doesn't mean he's a complete monster!
Um, do you have a cite for this? I've scoured every resource I can lay my hands on, and I can't find a whisper about any such incident. Could you favor us with a reference, please? Answers containing the phrase "but I forget" don't count.
Note that I'm not saying it didn't happen, but given everything I know about Moore, if it did happen, I'm betting that there was more involved than a little following and filming. I'm willing to be proved wrong, however.
Any one of the links between you and slashdot could be saturated and preventing you from speedy replies. I have on many occasition just let the browser spin on the link and eventually the page appears. You have made the supposition that everytime you can not access slashdot, that it is their fault. Sorry to tell you, but there is a lot of equipment between you and them. Any of which might be preventing you from accessing them.
Fine, thanks.
Doesn't this leave an incredibly detailed 'IP' trail? I'm not a networking person, unfortunately, but once you have found, say, 10 cracked boxes, if you leave them 'on', can't you use them to trace? Of course it isn't simple, owing to scripts, and multiple levels of cracked boxes... but the more smoking guns, the more evidence, isn't it?
This entity also had to be doing it in pretty real time, since they could switch boxes so fast after being banned. Of course, perhaps there could be scripts to handle that too, I dunno. Anyone care to speak up?
Bye!
GPL Deconstructed
I read both slashdot and kuro5hin. I never thought of them as enemies or whatever nonsense ppl have posted here. Finding Kuro5hin was an added bonus to my browsing experience (although I had -more- geek news to browse through == more time online)
I found that both sites often offered different news and opinions. Perhaps it was because of the self-posting nature of kuro5hin. whatever the reason, it was nice that there wasn't one but TWO main news sites for me. That's also the point of open source movement isn't it? to have choices and the ability to choose what you want, not only with programs but also web sites as well.
It was really depressing to find a black page notice instead of the regular familiar site. I do hope kuro5hin will be able to get back on its feet again. Cheers
enol/keto
No one I know can reach John Young or jya.com anymore - right after the new release and FBI warning to him not to publish (or keep published) the posting about the japanese secret service. Wonder if he's had "an accident."
Unfortunately too, the sites that are the most likely to be hit are ones where the creators and admins actually care about the site and pay attention to the community. Notice how noone talks about ZDNet discussion board trolls? It's cause noone cares, and the ZDNet people couldn't give a fuck if people trolled them or not.
I hate to sound bitter, but after seeing sites I have run suffer the same kind of sabotage as this I have to say it: people online are often inclined to be complete and utter assholes, and the only people it hurts are the ones who CAN be hurt because they care.
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
It was designed without abuse prevention in mind. All this anti-spam stuff for Usenet is after-the-fact kluges.
These discussion group sites give us chance to start over and do it better. Remember Fred Brooks' theory of the second system. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Usenet is a throwaway implementation.
Judging from the results, Kuro5hin also needs some work. I really liked the features, but robustness in a hostile environment is obviously lacking.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe Better a smartass than a dumbass.
hi mr. chaos I signed your guestbook.
before you have the eat attack, i did sign it from a windows machine. windows are the BEST!
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