Slashdot Mirror
More on Media Consolidation/Deregulation
I'll try to accumulate some links not previously posted. William Safire comments. The Register has an editorial; see also The Guardian for more on the British perspective. Associated Press story. The Washington Post has a good and lengthy (and rare) piece. The phone companies are making a cynical political announcement that they've agreed on a standard for fiber-to-the-home; that doesn't mean they'll ever use the standard, and indeed they've already promised *not* to roll it out anytime soon. Note that the FCC is removing any requirement for the Bells to share their fiber, so if Verizon runs fiber to your house, you'll be able to get Verizon service or none at all.
Slashdot has an interview with security legend Fyodor, admin of the famed insecure.org and author of the world's most affordable port scanner, nmap.
The best part of this interview is that Slashdot does not often interview criminals. Many Slashdot readers know that Fyodor used his tool to illegally attack a college student in 2002, for his personal amusement but also to the benefit of Slashdot's admins. For those that don't know the story, I will present a brief summary.
*Those individuals interested in independently verifying the facts presented in this article should skip to the "Verification" section near the end.
Sdem had created a hoax account entitled electricmonk, and used it to post this comment pronouncing that we was actually a cute Linux booth babe. "electricmonk" left an email at Yahoo and encouraged Slashdot readers to get in touch.
Fyodor proceeded to do so, boasting of his previous exploits with women he'd met online. He was even helpful enough to attach a picture.
This is where the story turns ugly. Sdem responded with a truthful email, in which he advised Fyodor that the whole thing was a hoax. After that, sdem posted a log of his exploits to sid=20721 (trolltalk), mentioning that he had tricked Fyodor and referring to many of the biters as "wankers". This apparently really set Fyodor off, and he began to plot criminal revenge.
First, Fyodor dug through insecure.org's referrer logs to find what IP address had requested the picture of Fyodor & his paramour. Using this information (and the logged User-Agent), Fyodor knew from the get-go Sdem's IP address and O/S. From this point, he launched nmap against Sdem's box and was greeted with the holy grail of sorts for BlackHats: an open X windows server on port 6000.
Sdem had been running an X-windows server for Windows on his Win2k box. Fyodor was able to bypass the authentication on the X-windows server and used the X-windows server to take complete screen captures of Sdem's machine whilst sniffing and recording keystrokes.
Fyodor proceeded to take hours worth of screen captures, including information on a "secret troll irc server" that sdem was using. Fyodor wrote a detailed writeup of what he observed, including an irc robot used on the server to detect new Slashdot stories for the purpose of early posting. Fyodor also mined and posted as much information about Sdem as he could find, including his real name and contact information. Jamie McCarthy used this illegally obtained information shortly after it was posted to log on to the irc server, monitor the bot, and modify Slashdot in order to break the story monitor.
Fyodor even submitted his "troll hunting" story to Slashdot, though it was rejected.
After he was done hacking Sdem's computer, Fyodor posted his screen captures and a log of his breakin to www.insecure.org/tmp/trolls. The content was removed 24 hours later. He went on to boast in sid=20721 about his "troll hunting finale". While sid 20721 is regularly cleaned, a cache of Fyodor's boasting about his illegal break-in is available here. Very interesting reading.
So, while Fyodor's interview is no doubt very interesting, I think that, as an accomplished (and due to the lack of prosecution very successful) criminal, the nature of questions given to Fyodor in the interview don't do justice to the type of expertise this man has in illegally penetrating computers across state lines and getting away with it. I'm sure that many companies would
Anantech.com has more info as does Yahoo
Microsoft should join the telco industry. Think about it, soon we'll get new error tones!
YAP YAP WE'RE YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY DUMB DYKES THE PRESIDENT IS A BUTTHEAD!!!! HEHE
I mean, the arguments/opinions in these articles do go against goverment policy; doesn't that equate to terrorism in the goverment's eyes?
AC comments get piped to
Indeed. That's why capitalism is a monopolist's heaven and a consumer's hell. Enjoy your shit sandwich.
TV is a non-essential service. Ditch it and stop whining.
I'm looking at using Linux to power a combination vibrating butt-plug/fake vagina. The idea would be to have the butt-plug inserted.. well.. up one's ass whilst the user inserts his penis into the fake vagina.
/proc to tie into the controls for the setup. The source will be under the GPL as I think this is a great idea whos time has come.
The automated stroking of the fake vagina and the vibrating of the butt-plug should bring joy to millions.
Ideally I'll use