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Man Reportedly Jailed for Using Lynx
wezzul writes "A Londoner made a tsunami-relief donation using Lynx on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site operator decided that this 'unusual' event in the system log indicated a hack attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him." Honestly, though, aside from a BBC article about a tsunami fund hacking probe that doesn't mention user agents there's little to corroborate this. Hopefully Lynx users need not worry too much yet.
That hackers would never think to forge a browser agent tag.
I bet it's a mickeysoft admin and he just googled what Lynx was and thought "jipes" a geek and pushed a big red button like it says on page 6534 of his Mickeysoft web admin book...
...Lynx has that oh-so-scary Y and X in there. It looks very L33t and hacker-friendly. Now, if that poor guy had only used Links instead, this whole mess wouldn't have happened. There's nothing scary about an I and a K is there? Though I guess you could use them to say Mikrosoft. That's kinda creepy I suppose.
Up here in Scotland, we have our own paper money. Although its legal throughout the UK, a lot of english shopkeeps will give you funny looks if you give them a scottish fiver.
However, wheres fivers and the like merely look different, apparently the english dont have a paper £1 note (and we do, although they're much rarer these days).
How long until we get arrested for paying for something with "funny money"? Remember, every time you use a non-standard currency, your funding terrorists!
Last i used lynx (which admittedly was years ago), it didnt appear to support https connections. Is this still the case? I'd be more concerned about a "tsunami relief website" that accepted donations over a non-secure protocol.
I'm sure there could be more to the story, like perhaps there were repeated log entries as if he had lynx in a script loop to do something as innocent as collect donation totals or something evil like password guessing. I wouldn't put it past the police/judges in any country of being largely ignorant of what a browser agent really means. It wouldn't take them much convincing to go busting down doors. The suspicious part of the story is the sysadmin thinking something odd with the user agent of just that one person and calling the authorities. Looking at the logs from fairly small web sites you are lible to see all sorts of odd user agents. If something did stick out, I would think a sysadmin's first step would be to do a google search.
Now let's wait and see what will happen next...
If lots of people do the same:
I just tried lynx to go to their donation form
https://www.donate.bt.com/bt_form.htm
via http://www.bt.com/index.jsp
So I hope everyone does it and makes BT see 100000x increase in LYNX usage
So this is what you get when you hire A+ grads from 'prestigeous' institutions.
So everyone, fire up lynx, lets make em look even dumber.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Back when the nimda worm was running around, I wrote a home-grown IDS to watch web hits, identify nimda-type probes and, if I could find a reporting address for the offending IP email a complaint off to the responsible ISP.
We were being serviced by Shaw Cable at the time, and every once in a while, they'd misread my complaints, and figure that my box was the source of the attack, and they'd send a nasty email to my roommate (who the connection was registered to) threatening to cut off our internet if we didn't delete the viruses install a firewall, etc. (we each had our own BSD firewall).
I got to know one of the supervisors there reasonably well, modified the letter I sent out to make it all but impossible for the people who read the email to confuse the attacking box with the defender, and he even added a note to the file for our connection, which resulted in a period of quiet after which we got yet another threatening letter.
I responded with this letter. My roommate (who took this very seriously because he was paying business rates to be allowed to run servers on the line) thought that I was being a bit flippant about something so important (flippant?! It took me an hour to write the damn thing!), but the supervisor at shaw said that he got a bit of a chuckle out of it when he phoned me to apologize for the error and promise a fix. His explanation was that shaw had installed a new abuse reporting system and that the note about our account had been lost in the transition (but would be added back in).
If you read my letter, (which includes the original autocomplaint) then you'll understand just how far people are willing to go to misread log files.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I have recently moved to Scotland, and think that the scottish money is awesome. I particularly like the latin motto on the pound coin, "NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT", translates to "no-one provokes me with impunity". That is just so Scottish.
So the police saw "Lynx" and busted him?
No, the article here says:
BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.
So, it's BT.
This isn't surprising. I've had run-ins with BT tech support plenty of times, and the staff can't even understand a simple SMTP transaction.
For a company that can't explain what its own SMTP server is doing, I can't say that this surprises me.
Obviously the support staff's check-lists only go so far.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
My first reaction was:
/. eventually, and it won't matter what the facts are, we'll get to sit back and watch the thread pee its collective pants with joy at the perfect victimization story."
This has all the markings of a story retold by someone who grabbed a few selective details and made them into a blog story that is so good that no one questions it. I'm really hoping that someone comes up with the actual facts here; I see boingboing has a note that they'll have more details soon. Hopefully it'll be explained then.
I asked around, and from what I hear, he was using both lynx AND nmap. So right away he's doing more than he should be. I can't find the sources, but some friends who have dug in further say he was in fact simply trying to hack it. Again, someone should corrobarate soon, and I hope it doesn't get swept aside by the blog flood.
As I said when this story first came up on boingboing,
"Well, this will hit
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Some eagle-eyed cashier is a local newsagent rejected a 20 pence piece I tried to pay with, and I had no idea why.
Turned out it was a Gibraltan coin. Basically identical to regular 20p. However, there's an image of (who I presume to be) the enthroned Queen, staff in hand, on the reverse. The text around the picture reads "Our Lady Europa - Gibraltar".
A really, really beautiful coin. Glad it got turned down so I could keep it I suppose!
It's geeky, but sometimes the artistry in currency design is pretty amazing. Some of the British banknotes are really fantastic. I'm not particularly opposed to the Euro, but it's a shame that the banknotes are a unified design (bridges & windows... the modernity of which increases as the value of the note increases). On the other hand, some of the national designs on the reverse of the coins are interesting.
Kinda weird to think how long these things stay in circulation... I've got a penny piece from 1978 in my pocket.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
I think they have complete idiots reading not only the logs, but the mail too. Or maybe idiots who don't read at all :
One day I couldn't access to many sites I'm used to visit, I did some traceroute and found 2 nodes down, 1 in NY, another in South California. I wrote to the companies. The first one answered within an hour, saying they hadn't found any problem (it was working again), the second never answered, but the server was up within an hour too.
I had sent a third mail to my ISP, before anything had been fixed, explaining the problem, with the same traceroute attached, saying that I knew they hadn't anything to do with it, but that it could be useful to know, with the precision that I was running Mozilla on FreeBSD, and personnally hadn't any problem.
Two days later I received a mail explaining that I had a bad configuration and had to check some option (forgot what it was) in Internet Explorer !
Kinda weird to think how long these things stay in circulation... I've got a penny piece from 1978 in my pocket.
This is horribly ironic.
The UK 1p and 2p pieces are the *only* members of the original early 1970s decimal line-up still in circulation, in spite of the fact that they are hideously oversized for their current value. Frankly, they should have been the *first* to be replaced.... but at any rate, they're the only coins that are going to date back that far.
The 1/2p piece was withdrawn in the early 1980s.
The 5p and 10p pieces were replaced with smaller and lighter versions in the early 1990s (the pre-decimalisation shilling remained in use until then, as it was the same metal, size, weight and value as the 5p piece).
The 50p was also replaced with a smaller clone during the 1990s.
The 20p piece and pound coins weren't introduced until the early 1980s.
The 2 pound coin is only a few years old.
But we still have the ******* original 1p and 2p coins. The 1p coin is so worthless now (less than the 1/2p was worth back when they got rid of that, I'd guess) that they should probably ditch it altogether. Only 2p is a weird choice for a 'base' coin, and 5p is just a little too much, so they'll probably keep it at 1p.
But why- at least- don't they shrink them down?
Probably not worth it now.. *sigh*.
I hate small change; taking into account the extra time I have to wait to get 1p back, sort through the worthless coins in my pocket when searching for 'real' change, stick them in the change jar, sort them, and take them to the bank, it's NOT WORTH MY TIME WAITING FOR THE 1P CHANGE!
Yeah, I *know* someone has proved you could make a living picking up small-value coins from the pavement. *But*... when you take into account their use in real-life, the overhead isn't worth their face-value.
Of course, since the US cent is worth less than the UK (new) penny, it would make real sense for them just to ditch everything below a nickel (5c IIRC).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Completely off topic I know, but a couple of years ago my 11 year old son was banned for a week from the school computer lab after being found using DOS.
Apparently the school authorities had decided that any type of command line smelt of hacking and subversive tendencies.
CSS support could work on a text browser by doing things like left and right alignment of text and justifying text. Making things bold or not. Possibly also setting the text colour if the terminal supports it.
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
Shameless Karma Whoring
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Amazing. Now please explain how you posted using a Slashdot account with no cookies and mandatory SSL. :-)
By the way, gotcha:
This virus works on the honor system:
If you're running a variant of unix or linux, please forward
this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your
files at random.
But that elinks isn't any good for us slackware users. It has debs and rpms for download, but no tgz packages, and no source code unless you have cvs set up. That seems very unreasonable, even the simplest of programs these days come with a simple source download or a non-distro-specific binary download.
I think it's a shame that writers of Linux apps generally assume that if you're not using Redhat/Mandrake then you want to compile the program from source.
I don't know what Shaw is like, but Comcast seems to be similar.
I really like Comcast. They don't block any ports and none of the pushing from the big companies has forced them to do so. You pay for Internet service and you get it, full service with no restrictions.
When Nimda was around, they'd run automatic probes to check if someone was vulnerable. If their script came back as yes, they'd shut off your connection, and you could make a quick phone call and have it turned back on after speaking with someone. They did the same thing with open relays, although this doesn't seem to stop malware from sending out spam (since you don't need to be a relay to send out a set of spam.)
Even though there's a lot of really terrible technicians at Comcast, at least the don't inhibit your full use of what you pay for.
My provider, Cox, has taken another route. They block Outbound 25, and they block inbound: 53udp/tcp, 21, 23, 110, 143, 25, 80, 443, and several others. While this does stop spam from being sent, it also allows them to charge 10x more for an "unrestricted" service at the same speed and service level (ie no guarentees.)
I'd rather deal with a little more spam filtering then have my access restricted because of people that don't protect their systems.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I worked on bill identifiers a while back and one of the problems we had was the number of torn corners on $2 bills. As I understand it, horse bettors consider these quite lucky! The idea is to place a bet with a $2 bill, but keep one torn-off corner for luck (maybe it is supposed to return to the torn-off corner?)
Well, anything could be a hoax, but I find this eminently believable. I heard somewhere (maybe even here ;-)about a fellow who got in trouble for using the 'find' command...
Well, don't you see, that's trying to break into those directories, isn't it?
Right?
Anyway, that's the view that was taken by the 'sysadmins' at whatever institution this was...
Then there are the librarians who believe that they've been 'hacked' when some student changes the wallpaper on one of the machines...
On the Windows machine I use at work, I've got a copy of my text editor. This... how to put it? ..._freaks_ my boss out. He hasn't told me to delete it, (some bosses would, though!) but it _disturbs_ him... Software he's never heard of on the machine! What if it does something weird in the middle of the night?
A lot of people have deeply irrational attitudes towards any aspect of computing beyond their knowledge -- there's something almost occult about knowing how to change wallpaper; using lynx, not using Notepad[1], y'know?
Heck, come to think of it, I've got a copy of lynx itself on the work machine, too. (Hope the boss doesn't find out! ;-) I was doing a little browsing during a break using lynx... A co-worker says, "what are you doing?"... "Looking at [whatever site]", I reply.
"So," she says very slowly, "you're... reading a story... OK..."
I tried to explain the concept of a non-graphical browser... Even showed her the same page in IE... I still don't think she grasped that I wasn't engaged in some fundamentally different -- and weird -- activity.
So, hell yeah, I believe someone sicced the cops on that guy!
1. Or, FTM, using a text editor at all. A lot of folks have no idea what a text editor is...
Rumor has it, though I cant find the law, that one is not required to accept pennies in payment for debts larger than 25 cents. This after too may jokers paid the IRS in pennies over the years.
Can anyone confirm or debunk this?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Although it has been a while myself, I used to be a rather avid Lynx user. Also, if you absolutely want to make sure that your website is 100% following standard HTML coding, I love to run it through Lynx if for nother other than to do a quick verification that all of the images are properly tagged, and other aspects of viewing web pages aren't all that cumbersome. If the webpage passes the Lynx test, I feel pretty confident that most other non-standard browsers will also work (in addition to IE and Mozilla).
Also, keep in mind that there are some (admittedly older) computers that you can shell into via telnet that only have Lynx installed. Rather than trying to hassle getting something new installed, Lynx is there and handy. It was also spread around quite freely in the early days of the web.
Exactly the same with me. I have been using straight IE (no shells, whatever) for many, many years, and have only recieved one virus -- and that was because I downloaded and installed an EXE I found on the net (hey, I was 8 years old, give me a break :P ). Since then, I have had NO viruses, NO spyware/adware (except the occasional 'tracking cookie' -- big deal), and NO giant memory/CPU leaks like I get with Firefox.
Yes. I've tried Firefox. I tried switching twice since 1.0 was released, and both installs would either suck up memory (ended up using over 200MB RAM after left open for a couple days) or suck up CPU (took 50% CPU to scroll on a few select pages, while IE performed perfectly).
I'll stick with IE, despite its pathetic CSS rendering.
At nudie bars around here they give you change for a drink in $2 bills, thinking you pass twice as much to the strippers when you give them a tip, not that I would know