The Planet's Most Moronic Hacker

RawGutts writes "This is the story of "bitchchecker" (the hacker) a user who lost it because he thought he had been kicked of an IRC channel by "Elch". The hacker comes back on the channel threatening to hack and ruin Elch's machine, and dares Elch to give his IP address. The address given was 127.0.0.1. "

Comments

Bash.org?

[Ninwa]

Sounds rather familiar to me...

Re:Bash.org?

[Ford Prefect]

Sounds rather familiar to me...

I think the problem's more that it's been done so many times before.

To add a bit of variation, the more clueful admin could have given a joke hostname, like one some wit at my university set up many years ago...

warez.mcc.ac.uk - "loads of stuff, but I've got it all already!"

Re:Bash.org?

[kingkoopaunion]

There are so many of these on bash. Still funny that people still do it.

Re:Bash.org?

[Anonymous Coward]

DNS entry is still there. xxxx@s1:~$ host warez.mcc.ac.uk warez.mcc.ac.uk has address 127.0.0.1

Re:Bash.org?

[tverbeek]

Why, it seems like only yesterday...

Re:Bash.org?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never taken a class in postmodernism. If you carefully deconstruct the events, you'd be able to see past the obvious and get to the essence of the real story. 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address. Loopback is simply a synonym for "myself." Our antihero protagonist was therefore attacked by himself. His reactions, however, show that he was unaware this was a self referential occurence. He is clearly blocking that knowledge from his conscious. It seems likely that he is therefore suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. This is a fascinating psychological study of the protagonist as antagonist. And you completely missed it.

Re:Bash.org?

[Shaper_pmp]

Really? I understood the whole episode to be a superbly-constructed allegory on the ultimately self-destructive nature of violent antisocial behaviour, with a side-moral on the dangers of hubris and the essential importance of external affirmation as an error-preventative strategy... or something... :-\

(Yeah, ok, I used to date a Lit Crit major. And you've obviously never handed in a paper on Postmodernism, either - your post was a feasible, intelligible and practically credible treatise. This is Postmodernism - You don't get points for being right, you know, just for being clever ).

Re:Bash.org?

[Krach42]

You do realize that you speak of a protagonist where he was in fact our ANTAgonist.

The protagonist of the story deceitfully responded with "myself" when queried for his name, and thus as the foolish antagonist were attacking his assumed enemy, he found only to be destroying himself.

These stories show a clear allusion to the tales in the Odessy, where Odesius told the Cyclops that his name was "no one" and thus, while the Cyclops yelled in distress over his injured eye, he yelled, "No one poked my eye out!" Thus looking delightfully ignorant.

Do you not see the TRUE parallels in these stories?

Re:Bash.org?

[andrew_0812]

Well actually I quite liked it.
I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was really particularly effective.
and er ... interesting rhythmic devices too, which seemed to counterpoint the ... er ... the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the ... er ... humanity of the ... I mean the Vogonity (sorry) of the individual's compassionate soul, which contrives through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other, and one is left with a profound and vivid insight into ... into ... er ... into whatever it was the article was about!

Re:Bash.org?

[Cosmic_Hippo]

My cat's breath smells like cat food.

Re:Bash.org?

[mibus]

Ode to localhost?

My localhost's armpit?

Life imitating art, possibly?

[soapbox]

Life imitates art (or else some would-be "author" copies Illiad):

Another reason people should read Userfriendly.org.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[GodHead]

"Another reason people should read Userfriendly.org."

That makes one reason.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[goneutt]

I know this shows up on www.gpf-comics.com a few years ago. Either e-Urban ledgend material or dumbass script kiddies.
Anti script kiddie, I'm not even bothering to make that a proper URL

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[wheany]

I read some of the strips 7 years ago. Has his art improved yet?

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[drsquare]

I don't know what's more satisfying to read, that post, or its moderation.

Although seriously, userfriendly must be the largest collection of forced, obvious, unfunny jokes on the Internet. It's as if it was made by a 12-year old nerd who's just discovered Linux and declared himself the 'ultimate l33t h4x0r', and thinks that he's the first person ever to make fun out of anything computer related.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely, reading User Friendly is like biting down really hard on an ass sandwich.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[untaken_name]

I agree completely, reading User Friendly is like biting down really hard on an ass sandwich.

Two questions:
1.) Why would you read User Friendly if it's that bad?

2.) How the bloody hell do you know what an ass sandwich tastes like?

Note: I don't read User Friendly. If you like it, read it. If you don't like it, don't read it. No need to engage in hyperbole to try and convince others that your opinion should be theirs. Let the individual read it and form his own opinion.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[null etc.]

Gosh I hate it when a sandwich is overtoasted and it cuts up the roof of my mouth, especially right behind the teeth. Yeeeh.

Holy crap! That happened to me exactly one second before I read your post.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[STrinity]

Illiad

Repeat after me: The Iliad will not make me ill, and there's nothing odd about the Odyssey.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[sayerofno]

You know...I read the synopsis for this story, and thought to myself..."I've seen this on Userfriendly!"

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[Hrothgar The Great]

Actually, all he said was something about an ass sandwich and you shit your diaper and cried about it for a while.

You SAID that he should stop "engaging in hyperbole" in an effort to sway people. Could you explain to the rest of us outspoken assholes how that is NOT telling him to hold back his opinion?

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[Krach42]

Reminds me off a fellow boyscout, who at one time during a camping trip mentioned that "Spam takes like Alpo." We tried this same tactic on him to get him to shut up: "How do you know what Alpo tastes like."

But were were not expecting the exact response, although the result was the same as we wanted: "Um... I'm uh... not going into that. I'll be quite now."

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[klausboop]

Note: I don't read User Friendly. If you like it, read it. If you don't like it, don't read it. No need to engage in hyperbole to try and convince others that your opinion should be theirs. Let the individual read it and form his own opinion.

You would disallow criticism to use hyperbole? What about metaphor or allusion or similie or whatever? Roger Ebert may not say a movie "tastes like an ass sandwich," (hyperbole) but he might say it is "garbage." I don't have a problem with that. And if he DID say a movie tasted like an ass sandwich, I'd probably avoid it because I've never heard him use such a strong comparison.

Maybe the issue isn't hyperbole but criticism/discourse which doesn't have any gradation: it is either the most frigging orgasmic thing/experience in the whole known and unknown universe, or it is the most worthless piece of disease-ridden trash ever (also in the known and unknown universe).

I appreciate the ass sandwich comment. I haven't of User Friendly and went to read it to see if it's as bad as the parent says. If I read a bunch of content that stinks, I probably won't continue on, keeping the criticism in mind. If it's not so bad, then I can rest easy knowing that the parent is a complete and total jerkwad.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[untaken_name]

Sure. Easily. Qualify it as an opinion. There's a difference between 'x is like y' and 'to me, x is like y'.
Had I said 'don't express your opinion', that would be telling him to hold back his opinion. I'm really surprised that I had to explain that. Have a nice day.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[untaken_name]

You're probably right. It isn't hyperbole per se that I have a problem with. It's the use of it to make a blanket statement which reflects poorly upon those who disagree. In this case, that if someone likes UF, they are implied to enjoy ass sandwiches. I don't like UF, and I'd prefer not to try an ass sandwich. I guess what it boils down to is people presenting their opinions in such a way as to villify those of differing opinions. All that would have been required is a simple 'I believe' or 'To me,' added to the front of the sentence.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[untaken_name]

Oh my god - you are such an ass.

Thanks. Every time some internet stranger calls me names, an angel gets its wings!

Try pulling your dick out of your fist and getting outdoors once in a while.

Hmm. Well, you sound like quite the authority on my physical movements. Are you that weird guy that hides in my bushes? No, you can't be, as then you'd have better knowledge of my activities.

You might benefit from the peer-review that (non-anonymous face-to-face) interaction with society affords.

Would I really? Nice of you to tell me so umm...on the internet. Good job.

Also, sitting around eating EZ-Cheez and watching cartoons does not help you any.

Sounds like you've some personal experience with that. What's EZ-Cheez?

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[untaken_name]

oh yeah, almost forgot. I didn't disallow the use of hyperbole, I just stated that, in my opinion, it wasn't necessary to make the point. Overuse of any literary device renders it less effective.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[untaken_name]

Yeah. The wording. They imply the same damn thing.

Really?
Hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table.

To me, hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table.

Not the same. The second statement implies that to someone else, another element may be the first on the periodic table. However, that isn't the case.
As I said, there's a difference, however subtle. Does that mean that they are *always* different? Nope. But they aren't *always* the same, either.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[untaken_name]

So this whole free speech, and commenting where comments are called for is bad, hmmm???

Man, people sure love to put words in my mouth. I should say, people love setting up strawmen when replying to my comments. Whatever. I recommend you learn how to comprehend what you read. Besides, who's to say comments are 'called for' anyhow? Allowed, sure. Desired, perhaps. Called for? I'd say 90% aren't. That's just my opinion though. Free speech...holy shit, people. 'Freedom of speech' means freedom to speak without government censorship. This isn't a government-run website, and so there is no guarantee of free speech here, nor should there be. Privately-owned forums can have whatever speech rules they like. Ah shit, why am I correcting your strawmen? Nevermind. Go back to sleep.

Oh nooo

[maztuhblastah]

Aggggh!! He's hax0r3ed my computer... I have the same IP... he was using my machine!!!

Re:Oh nooo

[maxwell demon]

Well, you should have followed the good advice of the RIAA: Always protect your valuable IP! ;-)

Re:Oh nooo

[Gzip Christ]

Always protect your valuable IP!

Please help! I just found out that my computer is broadcasting my IP address. Every time I connect to the Internet, send email or submit private information to a web site, I am broadcasting this unique address. With this address, someone can immediately begin attacking my computer. If only there were something I could download to protect myself.

Re:Oh nooo

[bicho]

Yeah!
Your IP is in the public domain.
Now you can't sue anyone who has a need to use it.
I am sorry, but once your IP is apr of the public domain, there is nothing to do about it.

Re:Oh nooo

[anglozaxxon]

It's called 'Windows XP SP2'.

Had a similar, RL case

[Badgerman]

Trying to deal with an idiot on IRC. The server maintainer told him to try our alternate server at 127.0.0.1. And to keep trying because sometimes it was hard to get in.

Never saw him again.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[kin_korn_karn]

I used to change channel topics to read "User Op Day! Press ALT-F4 For Ops!" and watch half the channel drop :)

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC is not RL :)

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[Gilesx]

Actually, this just makes you sound like a dick.

There is nothing remotely funny or challenging about giving a new user an unfamiliar command to wipe his disk clean.

This example differs from TFA, as the user was the one instigating the hostile action, and therefore was receving poetic justice. However, in your example, you've just been unecessarily obnoxious. And now you come onto a geek wesbite to brag about it. Wow!

I'd suggest you put all that energy into trying to get laid instead.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[KevMar]

In games, when smeone askes for cheat codes i give them the Alt-4 or say "Hold down Ctrl and type Q U I C K for a speed boost". Ctrl-Q kicks them out.

"Quick Cash" also works

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[Cheeze]

i always used the "type /disco to get down" channel topic. /disco is obviously short for /disconnect

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[chochos]

you misspelled "oops"...

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[Mr Z]

Back when I was in school on the campus UNIX system, I used to tell people about the default "slow mode" that most accounts start under. You see, since it was a time-shared machine, the default setting for a login session was a resource-conserving "slow mode." This ensured fairness on the machine, you see.

The trick, then, to speeding things up is to exit this mode. The command for doing so? exit $SLOW_MODE

Enough people do that, and sure enough, the machine speeds up... for everyone else!

(BTW, I'm aware now that said trick doesn't work on csh/tcsh users. This was an AT&T StarServer E running SVR4, though, so nearly all of us were running the original Bourne Shell.)

--Joe

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[jay-be-em]

Did you even read the parent to the post you are replying to? He's responding to someone who convinced a linux newbie to whipe his hard drive for no apparent reason.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[Hansele]

I recall telling people to "/sign up" to gain ops once upon a time... :)

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like *you* need to reread it ... you're obviously a Windows user, because otherwise, you'd know that ' dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda ' is a command that will wipe the disk - NOT a defrag command.

Now go eat a big slice of that humble pie...

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[theonetruekeebler]

Arrrgh!

Stupid +3 threshold threaded browsing had me thinking that what I replied to was actually in reply to this.

Yah, if somebody comes to you looking for legitimate, honest help, and you screw them over in a big way, you're an asshole.

Never mind, then. Sorry.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[ad0gg]

I wrote irc script that claimed to hack irc ops. It was quite simple. It just printed out, you are now an ircop. And when the user type /kill anotheruser, it would simple hide any output that contained the nick of the person he thought he killed. Quite funny as it fooled a lot of people. A good trick i saw, was ftp.warez.org resolved to 127.0.0.1. So you tell people to find warez there.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[alienmole]

You'll find out once you reach puberty.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[baggins2002]

Oh great, now your incouraging him to reproduce.
Hopefully he can't figure it out.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[phos-phoros]

fyi, the deltree /y C:\*.* command does not work within xp. Even more reason to upgrade I suppose. ;)

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[Large Green Mallard]

warez.dal.net = 127.0.0.1 too

But bleh, dalnet :)

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[pinkfalcon]

I've been trying to look this up for the past half hour, but I can't find it with google.

There were a bunch of 'VMS commands' that were handed out at my school a long time ago that were things like "Deliver" (to send a file to someone), but which relied on VMS only parsing the first three letter of each command - so "Deliver" was actually "Delete".

Maybe someone can post a link...

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[kin_korn_karn]

yeah, the ALT-F4 thing is ultimately harmless. It just closed their copy of mIRC. That dd command was shitty, though.

I'll bet everyone $10

[gowen]

That this is a hoax. It's simply not feasible.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[sgant]

this story has been out for a while and let's face it, this isn't real. While it's funny, it's just not real.

Come on...

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[LarsWestergren]

That this is a hoax. It's simply not feasible.

What? No, no, that is not possible. They have a chatlog as evidence and everything! And it is on the frontpage of Slashdot so you KNOW it has to be true.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[jellomizer]

Well it is feasible. Script kiddies have downloaded all these cool little programs that break into their systems without any understanding on how computers or the internet work. They think their are Hot Stuff because they found the programs to break and screw with the computer. And it is probably very easy for them to get in because their local IP address is on the other side of the firewall (hardware and software). Plus because he is such a bad lier, I am sure he beleaves the junk he hears from other kiddies, with suff like the reversing firwall that attacks the connecting system.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[VanillaCoke420]

Exactly. How in the world is it possible to be so stupid to think that someone would honestly help him out in hacking their computer?

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[IPFreely]

There are a few real world instances related to this. Maybe not as severe as the story.

quotes
More quotes

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[FidelCatsro]

Reminds me of a time i was on irc once , this guy stormed into the room shouting and threatening to hack everyones computers (aparently he had been banned the night before).
So i did a whois and a few other things and found out he was using windows.
It was fairly obvious that at best the guy was a skript kiddie and had hardly any knowlidge of the system .So i said "hey mate i just hacked your system"
he mutterd some obscenitys and not so polietly asked me to prove it .
So i said to him to type msconfig in a command prompt(i still have some working knowlidge of windows).

He then continue to mutter obscenitys about this having already been there , i decided to elaborate and told him i had installed two services as proof of my skill , those were RPC and messenger(this was a few years back) . He started becoming increasingly disturbed so i went for the kill and had a freind who uses windows to netsend him a message(he had forgoten to mask his ip) and in the message it said," the only way to remove the ""Virus was to deselect the rpc service and reboot" .
A few moments later a ping timeout message and the guy was never heard from again.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[AviLazar]

Well if he is a stupid, arrogant, sob he is probably too high strung up on his h4x0r abilities to realize what is going on. He probably thought the other guy was challenging his skillz and all that crap.

Anger clouds judgement and all that other Yoda crap.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[ajs]

Of course it's almost certainly a hoax, but these are always fun to read. If you ever played EverQuest, there's a very similar bit about the clueless ebayer who thought the game would be easy as long as you yelled at people a lot ;-)

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[hal9000(jr)]

Mod parent down.

The feature your talking about is called "Strike Back" and what it does is send some email, do a port scan, some other shit. It does not, in face, "attack" anything in a meaningful way. It is just a colorful phrase.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[InvalidError]

Well, one could simply write a simple proxy that connects back to the origin:port. Assuming the attacker has no firewall, this would have almost the same net effect as 127.0.0.1 except for the extra delays and bandwidth limitations. If there is a way to catch all connections to closed ports and accept them in some other way, the proxy would not have to listen on all common attack ports.

This version of "127.0.0.1" would give hackers the false impression of having a valid target and only the more clueful ones would realize that they are engaging in the same sort of mirror match.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Tassach]

Oh, I think it is real. There are a lot of clueless wannabe script kiddies out there who are too idiotic to know what 127.0.0.1 is

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[B3ryllium]

You can netsend with Samba, you know :)

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[kilodelta]

It is entirely feasible.

The guy was definitely a script kiddie or a wannabe. I love to taunt idiots like that, and it seems the crew on that server was doing a very good job of it.

He got what he deserved for not knowing that 127.0.0.1 is local loopback.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[FidelCatsro]

[10:28] your kidding , how the hell can you fake an irc log
[10:28]<you> like this!!!!
[10:29]<me> oh is this a fake irc log
[10:29]<you> yes it is
[10:29]<me> hm ,,, how odd

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Actually I have seen firsthand the type of idiots who do fall for that. Dear god, every Usenet thread for a while (back in the old days...) eventually involved duping some noob into checking out a server at 127.0.0.1

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[btlzu2]

Gimme you IP adress!!! I'm gonna hock your monitor and make it brake.

You don beleeve me doo yoo??

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Twanfox]

While I have not actually ever used it, I believe iptables for the Linux kernel has a module that can basically turn the firewall into a mirror, swapping the source and destination fields in the IP header and bouncing it back to the originator. It doesn't do any special tasks such as port scanning or anything. However, it is not recommended to use this particular module as it simply increases the flood of packets that you wind up sending down your line. It also makes your firewall far more useful as a reflector for a distributed attack on someone else, without even needing to break into your machine to do it.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[FidelCatsro]

Didnt know that then though hee , this was a few years ago now though .

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Gyorg_Lavode]

A friend said he saw this earlier in German. Apperently it is a translation and the original german is so written that there is no doubt it is real.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Krach42]

I once got a story posted on my personal webpage by some guy who was complaining that he was being attacked by my computer on an IRC channel. I was like "I'm running OpenBSD, that's ridiculous."

Then I started finding evidence. You know, that was the first time I'd ever heard about the system immutable flag in OpenBSD. They screwed with my /etc/pf.conf made the last rules allow everything, and then slapped on a big system immutable on it.

So, when I actually had noticed the problem with my /etc/pf.conf before even getting the story, I was like, well easy enough to fix that. Now write out to disk. Hm... write-protected... well, just override that. What do you MEAN denied? I'M FREAKING ROOT!

Now, I system immutable flag all my important files that I don't want to change if some script kiddy does happen to get into my OpenBSD box.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[FidelCatsro]

Shockingly enough i did get the joke , i was just expanding upon it .
Obviously that went over your head. I appoligise , next time i will stick a large notice at the top stating my intentions

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Havokmon]

Well it is feasible. Script kiddies have downloaded all these cool little programs that break into their systems without any understanding on how computers or the internet work. They think their are Hot Stuff because they found the programs to break and screw with the computer. And it is probably very easy for them to get in because their local IP address is on the other side of the firewall (hardware and software). Plus because he is such a bad lier, I am sure he beleaves the junk he hears from other kiddies, with suff like the reversing firwall that attacks the connecting system.

Replace "Script Kiddies" with "Windows Programmers", and welcome to my life :(

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[fitten]

Not necessarily. If he is logged in and running a script that wants to map a network drive to D$ on 127.0.0.1 (or whatever), it will eventually attempt to log in as the logged in user (standard Windows behavior). Assuming that he was logged in as Administrator (if someone had delusions of grandeur like this guy seems to have, he would have been logged in as Administrator), he should be able to delete files from there just fine.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[gkitty]

Though I tend to believe these things about as much as the amateur stories in Hustler, the story seems technically plausable and I have no doubt many people actually are this technically incompetent.

I used to work with a fellow whose hobby was to harass and attempt to discredit the Scientologists. They claimed he had posted their intellectual property on the internet, and when he was deposed he stated that their material was indeed available at 127.0.0.1 .

They quoted this verbatim in their claim against him, so it made it past whoever was responsible for fact checking the claim, and he boasted around the water cooler how he had bested the scientology legal staff. He explained 'localhost' on the stand and the claim was thrown out.

He was rather an odd fellow. I had quite forgotten him until some 10 years later I saw his name appear on slashdot in an appeal for money for his legal defense fund.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[TrixX]

Never, EVER, underestimate human stupidity.

If you still are underestimating it, work for a couple of days at a tech support line, and come back.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[dioscaido]

I'd like to see this supposed tool bithacker has that can automatically own a machine and delete hard drives.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[re-Verse]

Heh - sorry that you think its real. Thinking its reals says that you beleive there are programs that for some reason slowly erase drives, counting from the highest to lowest "35% of files on your G drive are gone" counting down until he logs out. Its a dramatic effect leading to a punchline, but its not really how things work :)

Its a funny little fiction, written by someone who knows enough to know that 127.0.0.1 is a loopback, but who maybe doesn't know enough to make his story more plausible... if thats what he is going for. I don't think he really was, and its more meant as a good funny chunk of internet lore/fable, on a situation many of us common to IRC have seen.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[budgenator]

I find the tarpit patches to be appealing on an emotional level; hit a tarpitted port and your stuck, hit the next one, and you sink a little deeper, sooner or later the poor l33t hax04 is out of ports to get out on

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[NitsujTPU]

I figured that the plausibility came from the fact that the script was intended to hurt the script kiddie's feelings a bit. Maybe an animation, a BSOD, and the kiddie doesn't have the pride to keep going?

Your version is much more plausible though.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[FLEB]

You lose a lot of the humor element there, though. Granted, it's dumb not to know when you're looking at your own machine, but it's not to the same absurd level of dumbassness as breaking into 127.0.0.1

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[mnemotronic]

Not feasable?

C:\>net use o: \\127.4.6.22\c$
The command completed successfully.

C:\>dir o:
Volume in drive O is Local Disk
Volume Serial Number is FFFF-FFFF

Directory of O:\

17-Oct-2002 04:31 PM 0 AUTOEXEC.000
11-Jul-2003 03:20 PM 184 AUTOEXEC.BAT

C:\>dir c:
Volume in drive C is Local Disk
Volume Serial Number is FFFF-FFFF

Directory of C:\

17-Oct-2002 04:31 PM 0 AUTOEXEC.000
11-Jul-2003 03:20 PM 184 AUTOEXEC.BAT

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Maestro4k]

Exactly. How in the world is it possible to be so stupid to think that someone would honestly help him out in hacking their computer?

• You've never ran into some of these script kiddies on IRC before have you? I've seen plenty of them over the years who are just that stupid. No clue about how to do a /whois or get the IP themselves, but plenty stupid enough to boast they can hack you into oblivion if they just knew your IP. Anyone that stupid will certainly believe you when pretend to call their bluff. Besides giving 127.0.0.1, looking up the IP for something like www.fbi.gov and giving them that is always amusing. When they finally dissapear you get to wonder if they left IRC willingly or not. :)

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[MrIcee]

Actually, starting at the high drive and moving to the low drive would be the best plan as once you wipe the C: drive, your pretty much hosed from wiping anything else.

Though who knows, I could be wrong, I havn't touched a windoze box in years.

aloha :)

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[zippthorne]

If there were a malicious program that erased drives, wouldn't it make sense to start with the high drives and leave the system stuff until the end to maximize the damage done?

AFAIK, the only real bottleneck to such a program is the delivery mechanism. Is there a way to get messenger to run arbitrary code? If so, the existance of a similar program is not only possible, but in fact, likely.

I don't believe this story is real but i can offer no evidence to substantiate my belief. Besides, surely no one would be stupid enough to believe their victim will leave the doors unlocked after a request.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[bani]

Enough of us have encountered variations of "127.0.0.1 hax0rz" ourselves, to know it is not only feasible, but quite likely.

The sheer number of idiots out there with terminal cases of modem machismo, combined with the billions of DIY-scriptkiddie sites, guarantees that stuff like this happens.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[PriceIke]

Which is why threads like this are useful/mildly interesting to unhAx0r types like me, who know nothing about hacking and didn't know (having had no reason to know) that 127.0.0.1 was a self-referential address. Now I know that.

No idea what I'm going to do with that knowledge, but at least I'll know if someone's trying to play that joke on me.

No idea why anyone would, but .. whatever.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Mr Z]

Also, your big storage/backup drives and network shares tend to be on the higher drive letters. It really is a good strategy.

--Joe

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Burning1]

Simple hack:

Type "\\127.0.0.1\C$" into a windows 2000 computer.

Select all files.

Delete.

There you go: instant progress bar.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[InvalidError]

I sort of feel sorry for the script kiddies that successfully hacked 127.0.0.1, there indeed is no better example of how much of nothing they know about what they are playing with.

On the other hand, they do get what they deserve for being clueless nuisances. I was merely extending the rod to slightly more clueful nuisances :)

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Craig Davison]

Not only that, but why wouldn't he notice that the computer he connected to had the same number of drives as him, and that the contents were familiar? Wouldn't he notice the disk activity?

I agree this is just some dumb joke.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Zone-MR]

Ever tried "format c:"?

Nope, let's give it a go:

C:\Documents and Settings\Zone-MR>format c:
The type of the file system is NTFS.

WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK
DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST!
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? y
Verifying 38154M

Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first.
ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID.
Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (Y/N) y
Cannot lock the drive. The volume is still in use.

C:\Documents and Settings\Zone-MR>

Also, afaik Format C: doesn't take an IP address.

Any means of remotely deleting the contents of a drive will be unlikely to give a progress indication - as this would require enumerating the contents of the drive first, which is slooooooow.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Gimme you IP adress!!! I'm gonna hock your monitor and make it brake.

Yeah, my monitor's got air brakes. You got a problem with dat?

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[DJCF]

Huh. I had to live with one of them. Not a pleasant experiance.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[skiman1979]

For a good time, call 127.0.0.1:37

Dilbert story

[martin]

Wasn't this a Dilbert strip from a while back featuring Alice as the sysadmin.....??

Re:Dilbert story

[brouski]

I actully remember seeing it in a http://www.userfriendly.org/ strip.

People

[Manan Shah]

Malicious hackers should be flogged in public and executed. It's gotten so bad with viruses/spyware, etc that I basically have to go to my parents house every month to clean out their computer, even with anti virus software, and anti spyware.

Re:People

[26199]

Google for a guide on how to secure Windows. It'll take a couple of hours, at least, but you should be able to make them immune to most problems.

The two most important fixes are disabling IE and using limited accounts wherever possible, IMHO. But there are lots of other things you need to change before the system is secure. Oh, and a little user education is essential.

Re:People

[codepunk]

I can tell you that I know some of the most moronic people in the world that I have set up with linux and they use it everyday without a problem. I also run a manufacturing floor 400+ desktops and get maybe one call a week so take your crap and spout it to somebody that will believe it.

Re:People

[TyfStar]

are you sure your parents aren't just tu rning them off?

that's the problem we have with a roommate. You can have all the protection in the world, but if they turn it off because they can't get an attachment to work *cringe* then they're useless.

Re:People

[fvbommel]

Isn't that what SSH is for?

Re:People

[fvbommel]

Give someone a off the shelf computer from an store and give them a XP cd and a Linux cd (any flavour), lets see how far they get.

My guess: they put the CDs in a drawer somewhere and boot the computer to the pre-installed XP...

Re:People

[codepunk]

Ok I am game I give them a mepis cd and you can surely bet they will be up and running before they get to the first graphical screen in the xp install. I have installed xp from scratch and it is no where even close to as easy as it is to install mepis. I admin in a mixed environment and saying windows is easier to use for the average user is just plain BS. Linux is different but clicking a icon in the menu has the same effect in both systems.

But hey to each their own keep cheering on your rental software.

Re:People

[mauriatm]

If you error when compiling your computer, reboot and then kernel panic, then ssh won't help.

there needs to be a "forum watch" section

[karmaflux]

so that I can remove it in my preferences.

Re:there needs to be a "forum watch" section

[myowntrueself]

It doesnt work; I removed 'Lord of the Rings' from my preferences because I am so freaking bored of the rings.

But I still see the articles on my front page.

old

[Mintee]

old :D why would we give him the publicity?

Re:News?

[Vo0k]

No, this is humor. Seen the foot icon?
Check "humor" in topics you want filtered off in your prefs and stop complaining.

My URL.

[jellomizer]

It is the same reason for my URL I gibe http://localhost:8080 figuring some one will see that port 8080 is open on there system (probably from a failed attempt to get apache working) and start hacking it. If sucessfull they broke into their computer. As for the most moronic hacker I have seen worse threates. Like "My Dad owns the internet and he will have you band, then you will be sorry"

Re:My URL.

[Mintee]

You know Al Gore's son? Neat-o

Re:My URL.

[DenDave]

Man I usually turn to attrition.org's going postal for a laugh but this is wild!

ROFL!!!

Re:My URL.

[Minna Kirai]

It is the same reason for my URL I gibe http://localhost:8080

Too bad that many of today's browsers come up with http://localhost.be/ when clicking there.

Re:My URL.

[Alsee]

My Dad owns the internet and he will have you band, then you will be sorry

All your band are belong to RIAA.

-

This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[Enigma_Man]

Slow news day? Someone just discover the IRC? Jeez, I think anyone who's ever been onto pretty much any channel on IRC has seen this at least once.

Why not report that someone hilariously booted themselves by pressing alt+f4.

Or that /quit "username" will kick off the name of the person who's username you put in, only to see who is the most hated person by the noobs.

-Jesse

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[KDan]

We once convinced this guy that "peer" was this l33t h4x0r who monitored all of irc and randomly disconnected people he didn't like, and/or people who badmouthed him. That was fun.

Daniel

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[Raab]

dont forget /timer 0 0 /hop

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[SComps]

Years ago, on the early days of DALnet we used to have the newbies that asked for operator status to type /helpop OP ME ASSHOLE!

the resulting kill by an ircop never ceased to be entertaining.

I'm a netadmin for a very small network now, and while not proud of my youthful indiscretions, I still snicker a bit when I think of it.

This was a fun reminder of better days.

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[SomeGuyFromCA]

i always liked the "hold alt & type fxfire for some cool fireworks" one.

especially if half the channel played along...

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[SComps]

sure :) _I'm_ offtopic ... Sense of humor required for proper use of this post.

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[Enigma_Man]

Yeah, you offtopic bastard! :) Don't worry, I appreciated the post, that is a funny one I hadn't heard of.

-Jesse

Slashdotted

[Manan Shah]

Here is a cache:

Something nice I read on www.stophiphop.de (got pointed there by a comment on www.macguardians.de) is this nice story of a hacker: http://www.beast.mos-worlds.de/modules/new...php?s toryid=184 (site might be down, quite a lot of people are reading this).

In case you don't speak german (just as this hacker), I've tried a little translation to english. I might have made some spelling errors, but the original spelling wasn't perfect either. The guy really said "buy buy" in the german version. I've posted this on the forum on http://www.desertcombat.com before, so if this looks familiar, might be the same. I've corrected some mistakes and put the < > back to the right version (The DC forum does not support them). All censoring was done by this particular forum here.
Notice that in germany we get DST earlier than in the US.

The story starts (I'm shortcutting here) with an [Please control your cussing] insulting everyone on the IRC channel. Most people there believed it was rather funny, but it got even more funny. For information: The dangerous hacker is called bitchchecker and the one being hacked and original author of the comments, who is talking here, is known as Elch. 127.0.0.1 is always the IP-adress of the computer you're currently using, any request there will return to your computer.

QUOTE
* bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
* bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> why do you kick me
<bitchchecker> can't you discus normally
<bitchchecker> answer!
<Elch> we didn't kick you
<Elch> you had a ping timeout: * bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
<bitchchecker> what ping man
<bitchchecker> the timing of my pc is right
<bitchchecker> i even have dst
<bitchchecker> you banned me
<bitchchecker> amit it you son of a bitch
<HopperHunter|afk> LOL
<HopperHunter|afk> shit you're stupid, DST^^
<bitchchecker> shut your mouth WE HAVE DST!
<bitchchecker> for two weaks already
<bitchchecker> when you start your pc there is a message from windows that DST is applied.
<Elch> You're a real computer expert
<bitchchecker> shut up i hack you
<Elch> ok, i'm quiet, hope you don't show us how good a hacker you are ^^
<bitchchecker> tell me your network number man then you're dead
<Elch> Eh, it's 129.0.0.1
<Elch> or maybe 127.0.0.1
<Elch> yes exactly that's it: 127.0.0.1 I'm waiting for you great attack
<bitchchecker> in five minutes your hard drive is deleted
<Elch> Now I'm frightened
<bitchchecker> shut up you'll be gone
<bitchchecker> i have a program where i enter your ip and you're dead
<bitchchecker> say goodbye
<Elch> to whom?
<bitchchecker> to you man
<bitchchecker> buy buy
<Elch> I'm shivering thinking about such great Hack0rs like you
* bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)

What happened is clear: That guy entered his own IP-Adress in his mighty Hack-Tool and crashed his own PC. This way, the attack on my PC was a failure. I was already starting to think that I did not have to worry, but a good hacker never calls it a day. Two minutes later he returned.

QUOTE
* bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you'd be gone
<Metanot> lol
<Elch> bitchchecker: Then try hacking me again... I still have the same IP: 127.0.0.1
<bitchchecker> you're so stupid man
<bitchchecker> say buy buy
<Metanot> ah, [Please control your cussing] off
<bitchchecker> buy buy elch
* bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)

There was

Re:Slashdotted

[seann]

Aqua Teen Hunger Force,
The moonites rule.

Re:Slashdotted

[NitsujTPU]

Honestly, I can't say that I've met worse... for sure, but I've met "hackers" of his "1337N3$$" often before.

That said... someone might could have said something... and maybe not let this get all the way to Slashdot.

Re:Slashdotted

[dAzED1]

I had a recent post set to "redundant" a *week* after the post was made...and my comment was one of the first posts. Ah well...I seem to be getting a few superfluous mods lately. I think I'll live.

heh funny, but what about all the others like it?

[zaydana]

heh this one was great, almost as good as the time i got a guy to get rid of ntldr off his pc saying it was a virus. Pretty old tho... I wonder why this one finally got on slashdot while others like the infamous zairo one and the many different ones we see at "cyberarmy" havn't ever been accepted? ah well. Maybe the fact that this one doesn't involve people telling the guy to screw up his own computer soo much, but the fact that he basically did it himself gave it a bit less of a "dark" humor rating. Any other ideas?

alt + F4

[Soothh]

Sounds like the "ALT+F4" hack to get ops :)
it still works to this day just like 8 years ago.

Re:alt + F4

[XMyth]

or the ALT+PASSWORD on AOL (alt+S,S signs off)

don't ask me how I know that

punishable offense

[dance2die]

isn't making private IP public punishable by law?

Slow news day?

[arevos]

Tales like this have been floating around IRC for years.

A slightly different twist...

[ChrisPaget]

I call my main work machine "localhost". Confuses the hell out of a surprising number of people and programs...:)

Re:A slightly different twist...

[British]

I didn't want my real name showing on as a subhost, so I changed it to 'firewall'. That worked for a while until the nice IT person told me to change it from the confusion ensuing.

Re:A slightly different twist...

[v1]

I wouldn't have guessed it would allow that. Any side-efffects?

Re:A slightly different twist...

[greed]

You used to see a lot of UNIX network config programs put "127.0.0.1 localhost full.dns.name" in /etc/hosts to do exactly that.

I always find it causes more trouble than it's worth to have an /etc/hosts entry conflict with my DNS config, so I take it back out.

More useful is putting "st.at.ic.ip full.dns.name" in /etc/hosts, if you've got a static IP anyway. (I'm pretty sure AIX does this for you, but it's been a while.) I suppose the DHCP client could take care of that for you, too.

Re:A slightly different twist...

[ChrisPaget]

None that I've ever noticed. The only time I've ever had a problem with it is when I've been trying to connect to the machine remotely, in which case I can just use the IP address. It is very helpful when being IDS-evasive though (I'm a penetration tester by day) since several IDS' simply give up trying to figure out who / what I am when they pick up my traffic...

sanity check

[evenprime]

I think everyone who writes sploits should include a small quiz at the front. If the script kiddie is dumb enough to not know that 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address, they should not be allowed to run the sploit.

Re:sanity check

[Ecio]

Why shouldnt they be allowed to run the sploit against themselves ? :D

Re:sanity check

[doublem]

But then all the exploit writers hanging out on IRC would be denied the humor newbies provide when they try to hack.

Re:sanity check

[shutdown -p now]

If they don't know that, natural selection will take care of them, as demonstrated by TFA.

Re:sanity check

[evenprime]

Why shouldnt they be allowed to run the sploit against themselves ? :D

OK, good point. I suppose they aren't hurting anyone themselves...

Re:sanity check

[pyrrhonist]

I think everyone who writes sploits should include a small quiz at the front. If the script kiddie is dumb enough to not know that 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address, they should not be allowed to run the sploit.

I disagree. You should be able to run the sploit against yourself for testing purposes.

Oh wait...

Re:sanity check

[Ziviyr]

I think kiddies should be allowed to scan/attack/exploit their own system all they want.

Or maybe kiddies should be able to sue cracking utility programmers for negligence? :-)

Re:sanity check

[orasio]

If the script kiddie is dumb enough to not know that 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address, they should not be allowed to run the sploit.

Exactly. If you don't know what 127.0.0.1 is, you should not be able to hack someone elses computer.
In the "article", that was the case, the poor kid couldn't "hack" anyother computer, at least until he finished installing XP again.

Re:sanity check

[wingsofchai]

Don't even call them script kiddies....these kids don't even deserve to be called that. All they do is download a program that someone else refers them to, because God knows they probably don't even know how to google well enough to find it on their own.

Re:sanity check

[evenprime]

Thanks for not recognizing that the parent author understood that. They were karma whoring.

Re:sanity check

[orasio]

I'm confused, aren't you the parent author?

Google Cache

[brian1078]

is here

Re:Google Cache

[TheoMurpse]

I think you mean here.

The userfriendly version of this gag

[tmk]

Mirandas experience with 1337-hackers is here.

Does anybody know what happened to Miranda? Will she and AJ ever come together?

Re:The userfriendly version of this gag

[efatapo]

This cartoon reminded me of back 10 years ago when I thought I was cool on AOL. It was great to jump into a chat room and offer people free software (most didn't even know what warez was) and when they jumped at the opportunity tell them, "All you have to do is push the Alt key + F4 and you'll start the transfer".

Ah...those were the good ol' days.

Re:How is this newsworthy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Although humerous, how is this newsworthy?"

Of course it isn't hard news, but why shouldn't humerous be enough from time to time?
Relax and enjoy yourself. :-D

I've heard of similar things

[whitetiger0990]

But this just pushes the limit on stupidity! Sometimes I wonder if these people are even human. I mean come on, how did he even get on IRC?

Well if anyone wants to hack me my domain name is: localhost

I don't think...

[Patman]

...that anyone who posts a ten-year-old joke as news should be calling anyone else a moron.

Seriously, this or things like it have been around since the idea of a loopback was presented. There's got to be at least a dozen posts to bash.org with the joke, it's used on IRC at least daily, and as others have pointed out, it's previosuly been in UF and Dilbert.
It's like Taco just figured out loopbacks, and he's all proud.

Re:I don't think...

[Council]

http://bash.org/?119969
http://bash.org/?83489
http://bash.org/?38640
http://bash.org/?7658
http://bash.org/?7229
http://bash.org/?11701

Re:I don't think...

[BlueHands]

yay! it haqs been a long time since i got a offtopic mod! wooot!

Re:I don't think...

[Wolfbaine]

It was also posted to Slashdot yesterday. Granted it's not a front page dupe, but it's a blatant grab for attention.

article mirror

[TMW2N]

the article was VERY slow when i looked, so i'm mirroring it here

http://www.georgiagrrl.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/hack er .htm

Re:article mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea. i've posted a mirror here:

http://localhost/hacker.html

Re:article mirror

[mog007]

HTML is your friend, m'kay?

Re:article mirror

[bergeron76]

Bro - your mirror doesn't seem to be working.

Re:How is this newsworthy?

[mccalli]

Although humerous, how is this newsworthy?

It's in the "It's Funny, Laugh" section. It's newsworthy in a section whose purpose is to make people laugh.

Cheers,
Ian

Trying 127.0.0.1...

[digitaldc]

# telnet 127.0.0.1
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to bitchchecker
Escape character is '^]
"-bitchchecker- i have a program where i enter your ip and you're dead"
Ah yes, this program is called IPDeath, it is responsible for thousands of nerd disappearances worldwide. Somebody must stop this guy before systems start crashing worldwide!

Re:Trying 127.0.0.1...

[kc32]

Thank God for DHCP... ipconfig /release all ipconfig /renew all

Re:News?

[karmaflux]

I like humor. Humor is funny. This is a chatlog featuring some idiot. The reason this is not funny is simple: there are a million of this guy, and we've all seen it before.

Hacking?

[delirium of disorder]

What does this story have to do with hacking? (Both the MIT definition of the word and the security definition).

See

http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=22&a=4

Re:Hacking?

[NitsujTPU]

Nothing.

It has to do with some kid making threats, then crashing his own computer.

It's main value is humor, if you have a real cruel streak that says that it's ok to hurt uneducated people.

bash.org claims prior art!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like this one ... or this one or ... or even this one.

Or maybe the author just saw this one. Enough bash links for you, editors ? :)

Re:bash.org claims prior art!!

[RevAaron]

...does anyone here seriously think that bash.org or /. is the first time anyone else discussed this?

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[A beautiful mind]

Hello Captain Obvious, you're Obviously late, does the Obviousmobile need some servicing?

Before

[kevin_conaway]

All you clowns start bitching about how this isn't news or this has been around for a while, I've got one word (well really a contraction) for you: Don't.

Not everyone has seen it and even if you have, its a joke, its funny, laugh. Most of us are at work and its nice to get some humor in the day.

Re:Before

[CFTM]

First time I saw it ... funny shit man surely brightened my day at 6:30 in the mornign :)

Re:Before

[jalefkowit]

All you clowns start bitching about how this isn't news or this has been around for a while, I've got one word (well really a contraction) for you: Don't.

Not everyone has seen it...

Good point! Slashdot should run this joke every day from now on. After all, there may be some poor schmuck who hasn't seen it yet.

Re:Before

[cortana]

I hear polarised thinking is a symptom of alcoholism. Are you an alcoholic? :)

Re:Before

[Threni]

It would appear that the German sense of humour is no laughing matter.

Re:Before

[iggymanz]

when the dupe comes out in 24 - 36 hours, you will be one of the happy

Re:Before

[telbij]

After all, there may be some poor schmuck who hasn't seen it yet.

Yeah, some guy who hasn't spent every waking hour for the last 20 years glued to a computer screen. Oh, the poor soul.

Re:Before

[Fjornir]

Yup.

Priceless??

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC Client: Free

Acting like an idiot on IRC: Free

Threatening to hack somebody on IRC: Free

Having your alias plastered on Slashdot for all to see because you're an Idiot: Priceless!

Now I know

[E IS mC(Square)]

Now I know why everybody else had same files as mine!!! Shit!

Re:heh funny, but what about all the others like i

[mikael]

There was another one I remember reading on slashdot where some guys managed to persuade another that it was perfectly safe to repeatedly type in his system password because it would only appear as ****'s to them.

Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[bigtallmofo]

127.1
2130706433
01111111000000000000000000000001
7F000001

Wait a second... They're all ME! Don't attack those addresses. Please make sure to not even ping them.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[CerebusUS]

Why does everyone always fall back to 127.0.0.1 when trying to mess with people? That whole 127 class is reserved for loopback.

Interestingly, on a windows XP machine the following happens:

Pinging 127.54.34.67 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128

While on my Mepis box I get the following:
PING 127.43.54.2 (127.43.54.2): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.43.54.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Sporkinum]

Cool trick, but what does it mean? Google turns up very little with reference to that magical address.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[19thNervousBreakdown]

It means the entire 127.x.x.x block is loopback addresses, not just 127.0.0.1

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[b1t r0t]

Pinging a random 127.x.x.x address doesn't work on OS X or Solaris. But it does work on W2K and Linux.

I guess if you were dealing with a total moron n00b script kiddie you could expect him to be running W2K or XP and it would work anyhow, and if not, you could just blame it on your l33t firewall.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[KutuluWare]

There is no real consensus on how this is "supposed" to work. The entire 127/8 is reserved for loopback purposes, but that doesn't mean it *must be* associated with the loopback device:

C:\Documents and Settings\kutulu>ver
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
C:\Documents and Settings\kutulu>ping 127.0.0.2

Pinging 127.0.0.2 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=128

kutulu@system1:~$ uname -rs
Linux 2.4.28
kutulu@system1:~$ ping 127.0.0.2
PING 127.0.0.2 (127.0.0.2): 56 octets data
64 octets from 127.0.0.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms
64 octets from 127.0.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms

kutulu@system2:~$ uname -rs
FreeBSD 5.4-PRERELEASE
kutulu@system2:~$ ping 127.0.0.2
PING 127.0.0.2 (127.0.0.2): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Can't assign requested address
ping: sendto: Can't assign requested address

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[harris s newman]

Yeah, and notice how windowz doesn't even have a sequence number on their pings? On third generation (or more) OS's, you'd think they would add such a feature that has been in the unix world for decades...

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[CerebusUS]

The entire 127/8 is reserved for loopback purposes

Actually, 128 is not reserved for that purpose. Consider this:

Nah, he was using 127/8 as a netblock representation. saying 127/8 is equivalent to saying 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0, just as saying 192.168/16 is shorthand for 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0

I didn't realize that some of the unices out there didn't respond to the other loopback IPs, though.

Slashdot. Hopefully everyone gets to learn something (relatively useless) today :-)

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[viega]

Uhhhh, the "/8" is an indication of the netmask being 255.0.0.0. The poster was not saying that 128 was reserved.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Akaihiryuu]

Huh...I just tried it on my Linux box and it worked fine for me...

akai@becton akai $ uname -a
Linux becton 2.4.22 #3 Thu Oct 23 13:16:48 EDT 2003 i586 AMD-K6(tm) 3D+ Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
akai@becton akai $ ping 127.0.0.2
PING 127.0.0.2 (127.0.0.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.235 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.071 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.065 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.2: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.067 ms

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Sporkinum]

That would explain why random addresses didn't work for me since I am on Solaris. I didn't know that on other OSes all 127.x.x.x addresses loop back.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[itwerx]

Actually, 128 is not reserved for that purpose.

Google for "CIDR"

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Chmarr]

Doofus.

127/8 is shorthand for 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0

Ie, the '/8' means 8 '1 bits' in the netmask.

Compare with 192.168.0.0/24, for example.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Mr Z]

127/8 does not mean "127 or 128" in this context. It means "127.x.x.x with a netmask of 255.0.0.0" (8 bits of subnetwork identifier, 24 bits of host identifier). For instance, 10/8 is reserved as a non-routable address range, as is 192.168/16. That means you might use 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x addresses on your private networks. In the pre-CIDR days, a /8 was called a "Class A" network, a /16 was called a "Class B" network, and a /24 was called a "Class C" network.

I'm sure those of you who are Net.Gods will skewer me on slight terminology misuse, but I think I conveyed the basic idea.

--Joe

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[greed]

You're most likely to run into problems with 127/8 addresses outside of 127.0.0/24. That is, some systems will have 127.0.0/24 as the loopback, instead of the whole class A range. Try pinging 127.1.1.1. (Seems OK on Linux and AIX.)

Check the netmask on your loopback adapter (ifconfig lo or ifconfig lo0, typically), see if it is 255.0.0.0; also check the routing table (netstat -nr) to see if there's a route for 127/8 going to 127.0.0.1. (Linux doesn't seem to bother, OS X and AIX both do.)

HP-UX seems to get it really wrong--they have a network route for 127/8, and the packets don't go through. OS X gets it wrong this way too.

Solaris gets it wrong but in a less-bad way--they don't have a network route, and the packets don't go through. But at least there isn't a route to say how to do it.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[CerebusUS]

Wrong. Read the RFC. The whole 127 is reserved, but only 127.0.0.1 is loopback.

bzzzzt. Time for an Anonymous coward to also learn something relatively useless today :-)

according to RFC 1166:

The class A network number 127 is assigned the "loopback" function, that is, a datagram sent by a higher level protocol to a network 127 address should loop back inside the host. No datagram "sent" to a network 127 address should ever appear on any network anywhere.

Source: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1166.html

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[DeputySpade]

In light of my undying optimism and hope for the future of all mankind, I am going to refrain from assuming what others have, that you need instruction. Instead I will assume that this was one of the more masterful trolls we will see on /. today. Well done.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[HiThere]

The joke would be less funny is the stupidity were less blatant. So the address used is *the* most common loop-back address.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[jbolden]

Because it works on every system. Any other address is specific to what they are using.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Jacked]

Doofus.

127/8 is shorthand for 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0

Ie, the '/8' means 8 '1 bits' in the netmask.

Compare with 192.168.0.0/24, for example.

Ummm, actually, "127/8" would be shorthand for 127.0.0.0 - 127.255.255.255. The "/8" explicity means that the first eight bits will be constant, in this case constantly 127.

In the case of 192.168.0.0/24, the first three octets represent the network and will always be 192.168.0.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, 127.1 is an easier way to type it. Some programs will claim it's an invalid IP, but it's not, and most programs will work with it just fine.

PING 127.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.044 ms

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[WaxParadigm]

Yes, you are correct. I think the author of the parent (now grandparent) post confused "loopback" with "localhost."

"loopback" = the full 127/8 range

"localhost" = the standard domain name for 127.0.0.1 (or ::1 in v6)

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopback
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localhost

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[HTH NE1]

Why does everyone always fall back to 127.0.0.1 when trying to mess with people?

Because when someone falls for the canonical 127.0.0.1 it's far more satisfying.

However, your point should be taken by the entertainment industry and have their fake IPs in movies and on TV be in network 127 rather than have one octet be greater than 255 (usu. in excess of 300) or having five-field addresses.

127 as the new 555.

Unless there's also a network defined to be universally invalid.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[scottv67]

Google for "CIDR", read the resulting hits and you'll understand what the gparent was trying to say when he wrote "127/8".

-s

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[wouterke]

127/8 is shorthand for 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0

Ie, the '/8' means 8 '1 bits' in the netmask.

Compare with 192.168.0.0/24, for example.

Ummm, actually, "127/8" would be shorthand for 127.0.0.0 - 127.255.255.255. The "/8" explicity means that the first eight bits will be constant, in this case constantly 127.

Yeah, obviously. What the hell do you think a netmask is? '/8' means the netmask, when written down in binary form, starts with 8 1's.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[Jacked]

Yeah, obviously.

Apparently it wasn't so obvious to the author of the message I replied to, since he was wrong (127/8 is not shorthand for 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0).

What the hell do you think a netmask is? '/8' means the netmask, when written down in binary form, starts with 8 1's.

Right, who said otherwise? Great, we're all in agreement. Thanks for playing.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[wouterke]

I'll say it again: What do you think a netmask is?

Write 255 down in binary. Count the 1-bits. Hey...

People have BitchChecker pegged all wrong

[selectspec]

Bitchchecker has been maligned by the press and the mob here. It's clear that bitchchecker simply spared these computer neophytes from certain demise. Why? Because bitchchecker is too cool to waste his time on some fools.

First thoughts

[Redwin]

Ah Ha! I have you now! Right, now to connect to the machine with a ridiculous looking GUI.. Ha! I've got a connection, now to try some usernames and passwords *presses a few keys* Yes! I've gained entry! Right, to teach him a lesson I'll delete some files.. *presses some more keys* Right now I need to disconnect so no one can trace me, and work on that big report for work tomorrow. Hey! Where did all my files go? Some bastard must have gained access and deleted all my files!

What do you mean Hollywood films are not like real life? I was sure thats how it worked! :-)

Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[rathehun]

This is an open letter to Rob and the rest of the editors.

Please do NOT let the site change into bash.org. I enjoy reading bash.org for certain things, and I enjoy reading slashdot for somethings. If I want bash, I'll go there. If I want slashdot, I point my browser to slashdot.org.

Now - please look at the stories submitted here. There is one about a fucking snail being faster than an aDSL line. Then there is a 12 year old story about a 127.0.0.1 hacker.

I realise that you guys are now owned by the OSDL. I realise that you now have ads on. However, don't let the compulsion to feed your advertising revenue overcome your editorial standards. By keeping slashdot focused on actual tech stories, about "Stuff that Matters", you attract a class of reader who is more likely to actually buy the server or the linux product that your advertiser is offering, enabling you to increase the rates that you charge.

Now I like a good laugh as much as the next person, but this is just lame. On slashdot, the stories themselves don't need to be funny, it's the people who post who make it funny. Granted, the beowulf cluster jokes are getting a bit old. ;).

C'mon guys, be strong, stand up to your sponsors.

R.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[odaiwai]

...overcome your editorial standards.

You must be new here.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[birge]

What a fucking useless comment. Let's just stipulate the whole "as soon as you pay for this..." comments for the rest of eternity.

The guy had a valid point, and free or not, his constructive criticism should be welcome here. Are you suggesting anything that's free should be exempt from critique and standards? Like, say, OSS?

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[cowscows]

Grow up man.

I thought the snail data transfer article was pretty damn amusing. This hacker one, less so, but humor is generally pretty hit or miss.

Slashdot is about a lot of things, one of those being tech news, another being tech humor. There's icons for humor, there's big bold headlines giving you an idea what an article is about. Skim those, and skip what you don't like. That's how it has worked for years. YEARS!

Having a little fun doesn't diminish the quality of the other articles. Go to any news source, they've always got quirky stories lying around somewhere. It doesn't devalue the rest of the content, it's just there because some people like to read it.

Don't pretend like your time is so precious and scarce that you can't be bothered filtering out what you're not interested in. Slashdot is in no way an efficient way to get good news.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[birge]

Not my point. I'd argue that if you don't like something about something that's free, it's still fair to complain about it, even if you can't change it yourself. The person who created it can either ignore you or take it as a suggestion to implement. As long as your critique is truly constructive, there's never any gain in stifling it. People who say shit like "don't complain, it's free" are just taking an opportunity to be purely self-righteous.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[micromuncher]

Oh come on. You know its a love in. This kind of story gets printed, where stories about APEGGA issuing demand letters than anyone calling themself a 'software engineer' cease and desist do not...

There are enough of us geeks out there that we could re-invent /. to be open and interesting.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[Cerv]

There are enough of us geeks out there that we could re-invent /. to be open and interesting.

Well why don't you?

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[bbtom]

Argh. Not the Beowulf cluster of duped bash.org stories! We'll never survive! Thank Natalie Portman and her hot grits for getting us through these difficult times!

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[idontgno]

You probably wrote an angry e-mail to the IETF RFC-Editors about RFC 1149, didn't you?

Now I like a good laugh as much as the next person

In gaming, this is a "tell". Whenever someone uses this phrase, it actually indicates a near-total lack of enjoyment of a good laugh as much as any number of randomly-selected "next persons".

Just lettin' you know. Humor has its place, and that place is any damn place you can find it in this sad scary crazy world.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[CaptainCarrot]

The humor stories are great, and filtering them is the last thing I want to do. If only this was one of them.

Honestly now, this is the kind of thing that most of us have seen a dozen times or more. It's funny enough that it retains its humor value for 5 or 6 repetitions. By the time we hit number 20 or so, all the humor has pretty much been wrung out of it and we're ready to go to the next bash.org entry.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[Bryce]

Now - please look at the stories submitted here. There is one about a fucking snail being faster than an aDSL line. Then there is a 12 year old story about a 127.0.0.1 hacker. I realise that you guys are now owned by the OSDL...

They're owned by osd*N*, not OSDL.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[dcam]

You have a UID over 800000. Judging by this, you are in no position to comment about how slashdot has gone to the dogs because you haven't been around long enough.

My UID is 200000 less then yours and I don't feel I have the right to comment on how bad slashdot has become.

Re:Old...

[Hsien]

Still... im yet to find someone mroe stupid than a guy i once new in highschool who believed that c:\format c:" followed by "y" reported how much ram you have. Unfortunatly his Daddy was a banker.

*Cracker*, dammit!

[Mirk]

The Planet's Most Moronic Hacker

No, darn it all to heck, this person is not the planet's most moronic hacker He is the planet's most moronic cracker.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the other poster. Given 99% of people probably associate the word "hacker" with concept of an individual who attempts to break into computer systems and cause malicious acts, I think it's time for you to move along and find another word if you want to communicate effectively with these 99% of people without confusion.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Psychotext]

Actually, you're both wrong.

This person is the planet's most moronic SCRIPT KIDDIE.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Angron]

The war of words is (and has been) over. You lost. Get over it.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[rikkards]

Unfortunately society has linked "hacker" to the evilness that this is. No matter how much you say cracker it will always be.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Kirth]

A Cracker is a person who breaks copy-protection. I don't see him to have anything to do with that.
--

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Threni]

> He is the planet's most moronic cracker.

Why, what copy protection has he removed, and from which game?

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Gulthek]

Sorry, while I do disagree with the negative connotation that has been atrributed to "hacker," I have to say that "cracker" is, putting it mildly, extremely lame. Rather than trying to force 99% of the population to conform to your vocabulary, just think of a new word for what you call hacker. Please don't make it rhyme.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Cyno]

There's no need to get all racist about it. So what if he's white. He's just an idiot.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[strider44]

no it's not. You should perhaps click on the link the grandparent gave you: "One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker."

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[shaitand]

Not to mention "cracker" already specifically refers to someone who reverse engineers apps/games to bypass copyright protection.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[strider44]

sorry, to clarify: a person who breaks copy protection is a cracker, but that's just a small subset of "cracker". Basically anyone who breaks a security system be it on a network or on a CD is a cracker.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[SmokeHalo]

I absolutely agree with your point about the term "hacker". However, I don't think he could be called a "cracker" unless or until he actually "cracks" something. From what I've gleaned from TFA, this guy probably has a tough time going through revolving doors, let alone trying out some l33t h4x. I would call him a "wannabe" at the most.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[veg_all]

I would say he's the planet's most moronic fictional character.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[TheJOsh!(tm)]

i always liked the way one slashdotter put it many years ago...

"Let them call crackers 'hackers'. We'll just refer to hackers as 'Gods'"

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[cactopus]

Biscuit

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Trogre]

Why do you call him a cracker? Is it because he's cheesy?

Perhaps you refer to black hat hackers?

Come to think of it, most hackers seem to be crackers.

(rimshot)

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[jc42]

The war of words is (and has been) over. You lost. Get over it.

Actually, it's just another example of a word that is a technical term in a technical field, while being used with a different meaning by the general public. Technical jargon is full of such words. And the techies (at least the competent ones ;-) generally understand that it's not a good idea to "give in" to the popular use of the word. This just leads to jargon that's costantly in flux, so you can't read technical docs from a few years ago, and you can't communicate coherently with others in the field.

The only practical solution is to face the fact that the word has different technical and popular meanings. When talking to others in your field, you use the technical meaning. Anyone who confuses the two is instantly discredited in tecnical settings.

A competent computer geek understands the two meanings of "hacker", and can almost always tell which meaning is intended. So there's no reason to find a better word.

One of my favorite examples is the physicists' term "quantum", which was coined to refer to the smallest change in a quantity that the universe allows. The popular meaning, of course, is a very large change. So the technical and popular meanings are antonyms. In this case, the word after "quantum" usually gives away which meaning was intended. The media and others say "quantum leap", while scientists say "quantum jump" or sometimes "quantum change". You almost never hear "quantum leap" in a technical setting, except humorously.

I recently read a news article that mentioned a "quantum leap" in an organization's income. I immediately thought that their income had increased by $0.01 (per annum?). But, of course, I knew that wasn't what the writer meant.

Others can contribute their favorite technical/popular definitions of words ...

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[jc42]

You're both wrong. Precedence goes to the oldest technical definition. So a "cracker" is a rural native of Florida or Georgia.

(I have some good friends who are crackers. And damn proud of it. And a couple of them are computer experts who object strongly to other nerds taking their name in vain. ;-)

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[strider44]

no that doesn't count because it's slang (whereas "cracker" in computer terms, though derived from slang, is now a technical definition). Though if we're taking the oldest definition you'd say a cracker is someone who cracks.

Re:How is this newsworthy?

[dubdays]

You have to remember that this is slashdot...

Think back to April Fools Day.

Call me OT, flamebait, whatever. But seriously, 98% of that crap on April 1 was not funny. Irritated me so much that I decided to re-format my hard drive that day. Seriously.

It's a translation

[dtfinch]

Originally in German.

Lesser known variation...

[Vo0k]

winnuke 2130706433

Most of web apps work with IPs converted from 4-digt dot-separated 256-base numbering to decimal.

For example, try http://1109654166 for "alternate form of Slashdot IP"

I'll take that bet...

[mykepredko]

I volunteer at a local high school helping a teacher explain introductory programming and interfacing using a Microchip PIC MCU. Last year, we had a kid that told us that he should just be given the credit because he was so good with computers.

The kid was, of course, an idiot. He could never get an assignment done because, in his words, it was too easy and beneath him. A sample assignment that he couldn't do would be to flash an LED once per second by writing an application in C - my version of the program was about 8 lines long.

After a sit down trying to level set him and tell him he wasn't as smart as he thought he was, he berated me and the teacher and told us that he was going to show us how good he was and trash our systems. I told him go for it, as I had a router firewall as well as a software firewall on my PC at home.

He asked for my IP and wrote "127.0.0.1" carefully on his hand.

The school didn't see him for a week and when he came in, he accused me that to stop him from hacking my computer, I hacked his. His parents were pretty agitated because the home computer was trashed and they wanted to bring a lawsuit against me.

We explained to the parents that 127.0.0.1 was the local PC's IP address and any attacks directed against this IP would actually be on the launching computer. We told them to go to a computer store and confirm what we were saying. We never heard back from the parents and the kid never returned to the class.

I've told a few people that if they want to show off how good they are, let's see them hack my computer at 127.0.0.1 over the years (it's in "123 Robot Experiments for the Evil Genius") and 60% of the time they've gotten the joke immediately. For the remainder, except for this one time, everybody else has figured it out before damage was done.

myke

Re:I'll take that bet...

[JaJ_D]

We explained to the parents that 127.0.0.1 was the local PC's IP

Oh NOW I understand why it's funny

;-]

Jaj

Re:I'll take that bet...

[91degrees]

We explained to the parents that 127.0.0.1 was the local PC's IP address and any attacks directed against this IP would actually be on the launching computer. We told them to go to a computer store and confirm what we were saying. We never heard back from the parents and the kid never returned to the class.

I can't believe that was the end of it. I'm sure most parents would get a little ticked off if someone tricked their kid like that.

Re:I'll take that bet...

[Mr Z]

Mine would probably laugh briefly with the teacher at me, and then rekindle and redirect their previous ire directly at me the whole way home...

--Joe

Re:I'll take that bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, now that you know, don't tell anyone, we geeks like to keep this nugget of 1337 info secret.

It is like the secret masonic handshake, if you ever come accross someone yu think might be a geek, just drop that IP into conversation and you're instantly friends like all us guys here at SlashDot.

Re:I'll take that bet...

[knBIS]

yeah, well check it out, i just hacked http://www.tvtorrents.ws

Re:I'll take that bet...

[SCPRedMage]

And I'm sure that most parents would get a little ticked off if their kid threatened to hack someone else's system.

Re:I'll take that bet...

[91degrees]

Yeah, but how often are people logical when angry with someone?

Re:I'll take that bet...

[Enoch Root]

We never heard back from the parents and the kid never returned to the class.

Wow. That has all the markings of an urban legend right there. Why wouldn't the kid return to class if he was registered in it?

Sounds like all urban legends that end in the 'victim' fleeing in shame; something which never happens in real life but all the time in ULs.

Re:I'll take that bet...

[Alsee]

C4n joo expl!n3 !t 2 me? I st!77 do|\|'t g3t !t.

-

Re:I'll take that bet...

[SCPRedMage]

About as often as people sue because their illegal were backfired.

Re:I'll take that bet...

[91degrees]

"their illegal were"? What's a were?

warez.phantom.com

[scovetta]

Anyone else remember warez.phantom.com? It was a DNS entry (duh) that resolved to 127.0.0.1. Very useful to fool the newbies.

HEY! This guy has all of my files!!!

Re:warez.phantom.com

[Ford Prefect]

Anyone else remember warez.phantom.com?

No, but I found one which still works...

I think the moral of this story is that all jokes done with 127.0.0.1 have been done before - in your case, you beat me by a whole four minutes with a near-identical punchline...

Re:warez.phantom.com

[Anonymous Coward]

$ dig warez.mcc.ac.uk

; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> warez.mcc.ac.uk
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20043
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;warez.mcc.ac.uk. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
warez.mcc.ac.uk. 3600 IN A 127.0.0.1

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN NS utserv.mcc.ac.uk.
mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN NS curlew.cs.man.ac.uk.
mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN NS gannet.scg.man.ac.uk.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
utserv.mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN A 130.88.200.6
curlew.cs.man.ac.uk. 11579 IN A 130.88.13.7
gannet.scg.man.ac.uk. 43500 IN A 130.88.94.110

;; Query time: 201 msec
;; SERVER: 64.182.4.32#53(64.182.4.32)
;; WHEN: Wed Apr 27 07:57:21 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 186

Re:warez.phantom.com

[Ruzty]

I used to give out an address that led to some servers at the FBI. I admin'ed several hundred domain names at the time and made various entries under different domains all pointed at such well watched US government servers.

I rarely saw the results of what happened when men in dark suits came knocking at their door, but my imagination was satisfaction enough.

Re:warez.phantom.com

[inertiatic]

Along the same lines... we would set a low TTL on the domain, connect to IRC, then change the reverse lookup to something like cert.org's IP, and troll away. Fun times.

Re:warez.phantom.com

[Ruzty]

An FTP server is not a website. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're just a newb and not an an AC troll...

So, you're saying if I told one 1337 kiddie to go get some warez at ftp.fbi.gov I'd be promoting a DOS attack? Because that is all I did, just using a name that is a DNS alias to that server. I somehow don't think the FBI would put a server on a public network with an accessible FTP daemon that could not handle an occassional connection from a moron or 2.

I have a feeling I've just been trolled though.

The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Ezza]

Back in the early days of IRC when everybody used dial up (and most people thought a firewall was something your car had), a lot of people had really crappy modems with badly written firmware (usually winmodems).

Anyway, when someone started acting like that idiot in the story on IRC, daring people to hack their machine or whatever, I'd say "OK" and send them a ping with the payload:

+++ATH0^M

And half the time, they'd suddenly leave the channel and come back a few minutes later complaining about their ISP or their phone line or something.

And I'd just be quietly giggling to myself.

It was really fun because the arrogance/stupidity of these kinds of kiddies on IRC was directly proportional to the likelyhood of them having a crap modem that would fall for that...

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[gklyber]

This is clever, but I don't think that winmodems existed in the early days of IRC. I don't think that many early IRC users even ran Windows (what was it, 3.1?).

Sorry to nitpick.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[paronomasia5]

i have no idea what your talking about "ping with the payload". does that mean fudge a ICMP packet with extra data in it? why would incoming application level traffic be interpreted by the winmodem firmware? are you talking out of your ass?

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[xenocide2]

IRC was invented in 1996. Which would, as it turns out, to be one year after Windows 95.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[bloosqr]

The problem is not the AT command set but the crappy implementation. It strictly should only respond to AT commands from originating side of the modem but instead the modem is responding to AT commands on both sides. Most modems did not do this, but I do remember doing this on an equivalent of IRC in 1994-1995 which I believe is pre winmodems but may not be..

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[quantum bit]

The problem is not the AT command set but the crappy implementation. It strictly should only respond to AT commands from originating side of the modem but instead the modem is responding to AT commands on both sides.

Not quite... By pinging somebody with the +++ATH0 as part of the payload, their system includes the same string in the ping reply. So it DOES come from the originating side.

The modems that have the problem are the ones that don't require the 3 second pause around the +++.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[autocracy]

No, this is one of the old classics -- it actually happened. The "payload" is a series of characters... usually meaningless. Whatever is recieved is echoed back by the other machine, data included. You could use ping the same as you use UDP... except you'd get everything back.

As for application level traffic being handled by the modem, remember this: modems worked as serial devices. Everything was sent to them as lines of text. Their control channels are in-line. A ping packet with +++ATH gets sent back right through that control channel, and then it's offlin[NO CARRIER]

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[quantum bit]

man ping

See the -p option.

The ping protocol says that the remote end should echo back the same data payload (usually defaults to 56 bytes in a specific pattern) to help detect data-dependant network problems during testing.

The windows ping doesn't seem to have an equivalent option.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, he's actually right. And the problem wasn't really limited only to winmodems, even some regular hardware modems used to do this.

They would monitor the raw character stream, waiting for special sequences. The +++ sequence was used to break out of "data mode" and enter back into "command mode", and the ATH0 command following it means to hangup the line.

Braindamaged? You bet.

There was of course an AT command to disable this prefix character, but many modems had it enabled by default. Oh the fun those of us with properly initialized modems had... if you think slashdot trolling is bad, imagine going into an IRC channel (or even a local BBS chatroom), typing +++ATH0 in the main channel and watching 2/3 of the people drop like flies.

This guy using an ICMP packet with a +++ATH0 payload is just a variation on the theme, since he was aiming at a single target.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[jcwren]

This is exactly right. Hayes was also notorious for putting "+++ATH0" in the top line of press releases. If the escape guard time wasn't implemented, you'd get dropped.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[b1t r0t]

The ping protocol says that the remote end should echo back the same data payload (usually defaults to 56 bytes in a specific pattern) to help detect data-dependant network problems during testing.

I'd certainly call being vulnerable to a "+++ATH0^M" ping to be a "data-dependent network problem".

I remember back in the REAL old days, this one guy had a C64 with a real crappy terminal program that would exit to the dialer menu if it saw "NO CARRIER". It was discovered in the obvious way: using it as a punchline to a joke. After this was discovered, we loved tormenting him by using "NO CARRIER" like a sig.

NO CARRIER
}}}|xx}|xx|xxx}}}

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[vjouppi]

Heh, I remember people sending +++ATM2^M to modem users.. That's also very annoying. :-)

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Chmarr]

Umm... how does that work, since most modems (okay, most DECENT modems), needed 1 second of complete silence on either side of the +++, and you're NOT going to get that by putting it into a ping payload.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[pclminion]

why would incoming application level traffic be interpreted by the winmodem firmware?

Not incoming traffic. Outgoing traffic (the ping is echoed, along with the payload). +++ is the Hayes modem escape sequence which places the modem in a command mode. ATH0 then hangs up the modem.

This wasn't supposed to be possible because there's supposed to be a three second wait before and after the escape sequence. But shoddy modems (as someone else explained, those that did not license the patent) didn't require the delay.

It's not ass-talking, it's old school :-)

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Winmodems became common around 1996-1997. If I remember right, Windows 95 was required run the Winmodems (Not Win 3.1). That's when I started in tech support at an ISP :P

There were several popular IRC clients for Windows well before that time. I was using mIRC on my Windows 3.0 machine in 1995, and I remember there were others.

However, in the early days of IRC most people telneted into a Unix server and used the IRC client there. The Unix servers usually had a more powerful client. Plus-- it was hard to run mIRC & Netscape at the same time on a 386/16Mhz/8 machine :)

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[coyote-san]

I seem to recall tales of a usenet posting containing +++ATZ (I think) in the early 80s. My first internet accessible account was in 83 or so and (if my memory serves) it was already lore. Definitely before the kremvax hoax.

In those days of lore we did not have DNS and dot naming and all of those other new-fangled contraptions. Everything was UUCP (or bitnet or arpanet or IBM's network protocl) and point-to-point. You routed your mail by hand (usually as fast as possible to the AT&T backbone, e.g., "harpo"), and I think many universities(!) were connected by a single 1200 baud modem that would connect overnight when long distance charges were lowest. Even then some CS departments caught grief over the cost. The usenet "your message may cost thousands of dollars to send" was an exaggeration, but it probably did cost a few dollars when you added up the LD charges for everyone.

(If you think that was bad, the entire country of New Zealand was connected by some 9 track tapes in the cargo hold of the daily flights between Sydney and Auckland!)

The AT&T backbone wouldn't use Hayes modems and knockoffs, but a lot of universities did. UUCP and the other modem protocols in use at the time, as I recall, blindly copied the data.

So you have a message containing a modem disconnect command. The connection is run in the middle of the night when nobody is around. There's the normal usenet and email traffic and suddenly one (or both!) ends go down. The admin is a bit confused, but everything looks okay. Next night, same thing because of automatic retries. And again the next night. People start getting seriously annoyed....

Sometimes I wonder if this was the motivation behind the first protocols that would either encode the payload or at least escape certain sequences.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[damiam]

"most decent modems" != all modems

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Jboy_24]

Back in the days of multi-line BBSs (Shoreline in Vancouver in particular) if you wanted to drop someone so a friend could get on you'd go the chat line and convince an 'ankie' to type in 'NO CARRIER'. I can't remember if it was the modem or the software but it'd work nearly 100% of the time.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Dr. Evil]

He said "usually" Winmodems, I've seen a few non-winmodems subject to this kind of attack.

Like others posted, the real Hayes protocol demands a 3-second delay before dropping to command mode after the "+++" is entered. The modems really sucked :-)

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Raxxon]

There was one poor bastard we kept pissing off because of his poor terminal software. Someone would toss out 'rz' in chat (even in the middle of a word) and it would invoke ZModem downloads. After a couple of hours he finally logged for the night.

And I always thought the ATH0 bug was an issue of the Terminal program, not the modem or it's drivers (should you be using windows at the time). I know on BBS's we had a few folks who threw MAJOR fits because someone(*cough*) had ATH0,ATA^M as a tagline on messages. It was throwing them off and it made it rather hard to read all the messages in your selected subs. After they were told to stop using crap terminal progs, the problems went away.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Dmala]

Back when I was young and foolish, I got nailed chatting on a BBS. The local, self-styled hacker logged in and made an offhand comment about telephone company switching computers. About 5 minutes later, he said something like "Hey, that's weird, can you type +++?" I, of course, tried it and blew myself away. The embarassing part is that I took his bait and remembered his comment about telephone company computers, and assumed he was screwing with my line. (I suppose he was, just not in the way I thought.) After nuking myself a few more times ("What did you mean about typing +++, anyway?"), I got really pissed and laid into him, much to his amusement I'm sure. It wasn't until several hours later that I got a clue, broke out my modem documentation, and learned what a n00b I really was.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[taniwha]

err that should be "the whole country of Australia was connected by some 9 track tapes in the cargo hold of weekly flights between LAX and Sydney" ... just for historical accuracy of course

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[khrtt]

From what I remember, properly implemented command mode escape required a "guard time" before and after the +++. The guard time could have been about a second, and you could set it via a register on some modems. According to the initial design, the +++ had to be sent back-to-back, without any delay in between, but that requirement was rarely implemented since it wouldn't be possible to type +++ back-to-back, and the sequence would always have to be scripted, which is inconvinient.

Of course, the +++ escape should obviously only ever work on the sent data, so the NO CARRIER hack could only work with ridiculously stupid modem firmware.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[runderwo]

US Robotics sold a 14.4 Winmodem as far back as 1994. Rockwell RPI modems were also Winmodems for all intents and purposes. MWave 14.4 modems also existed around that time, though they weren't really Winmodems in nature.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[runderwo]

+++ by itself doesn't hang up your modem. You could have entered ATO to go right back online.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[runderwo]

That's funny, because NO CARRIER is the string a modem emits to the terminal once it has already given up the connection - it is not a command that the modem would understand much less cause it to hang up. Perhaps the users had some badly written terminal software that automatically exited or redialed when that string appeared.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Dr. Evil]

Of course, the +++ escape should obviously only ever work on the sent data, so the NO CARRIER hack could only work with ridiculously stupid modem firmware.

That's why you use ping. The victim machine sends the +++ATH0^M in the reply packet.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[jcuervo]

More likely the BBS's dialin software resetting the modem after it sees a "NO CARRIER".

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[larien]

I know I had this problem on a "real" modem way back when with some AT command (can't remember what, been so long...). I eventually tracked down the config changes to stop it happening.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[SnarfQuest]

I had one really idiot of a modem, don't remember the brand/model, that would respond to "+++" coming in from the computer side, but not from the terminal side.

If you had echo turned off on the computer end, you couldn't get the modem to go into command mode!

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[coyote-san]

Okay. It's either my faulty memory, the faulty memory of the person who told me that, or it simply predates the other.

Now, as for pidgeon-net I understand that it was actually tested. With the expected high latency and data loss due to falcons and confused birds.

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Ezza]

> This is clever, but I don't think that winmodems existed in the early days of IRC. I don't think that many early IRC users even ran Windows (what was it, 3.1?).

You're right, I'm getting my timing wrong (it was 10 years ago or so after all), the memory fade with age :)

I should have just said "mostly cheap crappy modems" (which would imply all win-modems anyway :-)

And yes, as others have said, the +++ATH0 is sent to the victims modem by the reply ping (I thought that was obvious, but I guess not everyone on Slashdot is a nerd ;-)

Re:The Ping of NO CARRIER

[jcuervo]

I actually just tried this on IRC, for the hell of it. (/CTCP * ECHO +++ATH0)

The only real response was from one of the guys saying his fiber connection was "not feering".

That will teach him....

[Stop Error]

127.0.0.1 pWnd

similar method for avoiding spam

[k2enemy]

i get annoyed with sites that have unnecessary free registrations. instead of making up email addresses, i started using root@127.0.0.1

hopefully it annoys the site operators. plus, it's not really lying since that is one of my email addresses.

And I'll bet everyone $10

[aug24]

...that you don't know what feasible means. Perhaps you meant plausible?

J.

k3wl w4r3z sitezzz!

[Megane]

warez.bofh.org.uk
warez.satanic.org
warez.cybernothing.org
warez.dsnet.com
warez.opus1.com
aNd m4nI m03r!!!!!11!!@!@

How 2 ma3k yuor 0wnzor w4r3z sYt3!!!!11!@!

(Note to mods: RTFL before modding me down)

couple hours?

[Lehk228]

maybe a couple hours downloading SP2 on dialup, but after that it only takes a few minutes to make XP secure (install firefox, set IE's security to MAX with password) and run it behind a NAT

Re:couple hours?

[Lehk228]

that's like saying you can improve the performance and reliability of your ford by buying a toyota, sur it works but it dodges the issue entirely

Re:couple hours?

[26199]

If only. Try actually doing what I suggested and looking up a guide on making Windows secure. You need to disable services, remove/disable the guest account, set things up to work with limited account privileges, etc, etc.

A few small changes go a long way, it is true, but stopping 95% of problems isn't as good as stopping 99.9%.

Yes, there are people that dumb

[doublem]

No one ever went bankrupt overestimating the stupidity of the American public.

The moment you use the rationale "People aren't that stupid" to say why something can't happen, they you've already lost the argument. :)

People buy things from Spam and give out their personal details in response to bulk e-mail. I'm sorry, but many people are dumb as rocks.

Besides, we already know what 127.0.0.1 is, but how's a novice to know this, if all they know of computers is what they've picked up in a few weeks of experimenting?

I don't find this implausible at all. Even the fact that the "hacker" never made the connection between their hack attempts and being disconnected is consistent with what I've seen of human nature. I used to have an employee who blew five fuses on her UPS and didn't realize that it happened every time she plugged her space heater into the UPS!

I had her plug the Space Heater into the wall, and the UPS stopped blowing fuses.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[gowen]

The moment you use the rationale "People aren't that stupid"

Which I didn't do. The implausible bits are such mere technical considerations such as the fact that his computer is still running an IRC after half the hard drive is supposedly gone.

That and the fact it's one of the oldest jokes in computing.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[Fallen Seraph]

It's possible believe it or not. Several years ago I was copying my Windows directory to another drive because I was formatting my old one and wanted to take my time and pick any settings that I didn't want to lose (this way I made sure I didn't forget everything, and hard drive space wasn't an issue). I accidently clicked cut and didn't notice and after about an hour and a half the system suddenly began gagging and dieing. I was on AIM and all of a sudden my font turned arabic and then expanded to a seamingly impossible resolution. I realized my mistake and tried to abort the operation but to no avail. I'm ashamed to admit the event actually transpired, but yes, your system can chug along for a while as your files get trashed. And quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if it did happen

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[doublem]

his computer is still running an IRC after half the hard drive is supposedly gone.

If "Program Files" and the System root are in the second half that's being deleted, and it's a delete and not a format, then yes, I can see that happening.

As a matter of fact I have seen this happen before. At a former job, we had a sales guy who insisted on "cleaning up" his hard drive every now and then. In Windows 98 he deleted large swaths of the Windows directory and Program Files, and the system ran for the rest of the day. When he rebooted however, the system was dead.

The same sales guy did it again during the W2K roll out. The users all had admin accounts on their machines (Don't ask, it was because of a political nightmare involving a management staff who thought having less than an administrator account meant they were being treated like children.)

Anyway, he tried to delete the c:\winnt folder, and kept at it while getting error messages about files being in use. He finally called IT when he got tired of "File in use" errors. I got up there and listened politely as he explained what he'd been doing.

"You know of course that Windows 2000 is based on Windows NT, right?"

"Yeah, but I'm not running NT, so I don't need it."

"In Windows 2000, the WINNT folder is the same thing as the Windows directory in 98. Did you notice that you don't have a Windows directory?"

He tried to reboot, and sure enough, the system was dead.

A management meeting ensued where I had to defend "Renaming the Windows directory" on the new Windows 2000 systems. The fact that it's the default name, and that the systems came from Dell that way, meant nothing. The company owner repeatedly told me to "Just rename it, I don't see why you'd have to redo the server."

The moral of the story is of course, that Windows is surprisingly resilient in terms of running as vital system files are deleted from underneath it.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

There's a program to get around copy protection for some commercial games. The program allows you to disconnect various drives while the computer is on, so the copy protection can't find your real cd drives and ask for a CD. By accident, I disconnected my hard drives and Windows kept working. Trillian stayed up until I could re-enable the hard drives.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[Gumph]

it's not just the US public that are as thick as a bag of crank smokers.
I had this one guy call up when I was a helldesk geek in the UK, saying he couldn't dial up using his modem.
So I went to see what the problem was and the man had plugged his modem lead into a radiator!!!!

I am not kidding, the radiator in question was one of these storage heater jobs that was hardwired into a closed power outlet, the end where the coiled power lead went into the rad was an RJ-11 socket - no idea why. But our man unplugs it and slaps the modem lead in!!!!
I had to quickly plug him into the proper telephone socket and leave before killing myself with laughter in front of him!

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[Black Perl]

That would only be implausible if the IRC app didn't fit into his available RAM. But since IRC apps are fairly small and not likely to require swapping or other disk activity, it's plausible. That doesn't mean it's true, of course.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[woolla]

That reminds me of when I was doing mainframe assembler training (10 weeks) at British Airways. After a couple of weeks we got to the point of assembling our code and testing on the test system.
One morning the mainframe test system (for all of BA) went down 3 times in succession, until one of the chaps said "hey look at this, every time I run my code, the test system crashes."

And he still programs computers for a living.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

My personal favorite:

I do alot of rollouts. Barely IT work at all, the guy who mops the control center floor at NASA doesn't get to claim to be an astronaut or rocket scientist either. But the worst rollout ever, was for a public school system.

This public school system was more ghetto than most, by rollout, I mean maybe replacing 3-5 of the PCs in labs that had 20 (so there was always a mix of crap systems), maybe only half the computer lab rooms in any one building. And often, things would never be scheduled right, so we were told to go in the rooms even during class, and just be quiet, teachers knew we'd be there, wasn't a problem.

Being ghetto, the kids weren't expected to do real schoolwork, and would goof off. Porn sites, gambling, all the stupidest shit you've ever seen. Well, 20 minutes into this, almost done setting it all up, this black girl screams, "Oh my god, it say I won a million dollar, is it fo real!?!". A stupid spammy popup of course, but she had no critical thinking skills, nor had anyone ever bothered to tell her how much spam like this was out there. No big deal right, she's a kid?

So, me being the fool that I am, I try to explain to her what it is, not sarcastic or anything. Really. Can't remember how I worded it, but the tone of my voice was such that I was trying my best not to sound like I was patronizing, nor like I was making fun of her. Before I had even finished the one sentence, the cow-like teacher was "How do you know, she might have won something, you jus don want her to win." As the teacher waddled over to the computer screen, I shut up, she didn't bother to follow up with a tirade, and I finished up as soon as possible. Got the hell out of there.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You guys do all realize that programs are loaded into ram, and executed from there? Only the most minimalistic embedded systems execute from storage, and even then it's usually a chip.

When you delete the executable off the drive (assuming it lets you), the copy in ram can still run (at least until it needs to look at a config file again).

For bigger executables this may not be completely true, the system may only load chunks of exe at a time, choosing to load others later to save ram or whatever. And on windows, there are always dll files that may be loaded long after the program has started.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[doublem]

Long gone, the company has been sold to a larger firm that's even worse.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[HumanTorch]

Windows is surprisingly resilient in terms of running as vital system files are deleted from underneath it

I remember a system tuner utility that came with my previous video card that allowed me to cache Windows in memory. Presumably you could then delete just about everything.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[anakin876]

Actually, there is some audio hardware that also uses RJ-11 jacks for power. They come with warning labeles on the connectors and everything. I still don't understand why they would do that. Perhaps they believe it is a cheap and easy way to transfer DC power (cheaply availabel connectors and such). either way, it always seemed like a REALLY bad idea to me - imagine if the power supply got plugged into your phone line - It might not damage the telco equipment, but it would could do some damage to all the phones in your house/office.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[dlZ]

I had a user once who would probably get along great with yours. She used to call me up, at least once a week, freaking out (many times crying!!) because her keyboard and/or mouse didn't work anymore. Every single time, she had moved her computer to the other side of the desk, yanking out the keyboard and mouse. The desk were setup with those holes for the keyboard and mouse cords, so they snagged and pulled out easily. I explained every time that she shouldn't move the computer or it will happen again, and that she isn't even supposed to move it in the first place.

I left the position about 6 months after this started happening for greener pastures, and a friend ended up with my old position. She did this almost weekly to him until she left for another job.

Oh, for clarification, she was a manager in the company, and definitely had the beginning of some pointy hair. Her main purpose for needing the computer was playing web games, which I was told to unblock after she complained none of them worked (said she only played on lunch, but it looked more like she played all day except for lunch.)

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[budgenator]

Not being able to do things like that would mean that we'd have to use a boot disk everytime we upgraded a kernel in Linux. We'd never be able to even do an windows online upgrade.

Just rename it, I don't see why you'd have to redo the server. How pissed did he get when you did that LOL

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[idontgno]

We've been over this.

If you prefer, check the original linked article.

Short answer? Windows boxes seem to miss deleted files during runtime somewhat less than you might expect. So technical feasibility is not a show-stopper in this story.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[Mr Z]

Under UNIX and Linux, if you delete a file that's in use, the directory entry goes away, but the inode remains in place until all the users of the file close their file handles. So, if you delete a running executable, it can still bring pages of itself into memory as needed, even though you can't see the file any more. Once the program exits, the inode gets freed and the disk space reclaimed.

So, you could do an rm -rf / and keep running for quite awhile, until, like you said, an existing task needs to open a file that's no longer there, or you try to fork some new task.

I should try that some time. I have a UML disk image set up somewhere... I could start up UML in "COW" mode (meaning any changes to the disk image get written to a separate "delta" file that I can throw away afterwards).

As for bitchchecker, it seems entirely plausible that remote disk-erasing software would work from higher-lettered disks to lower-lettered disks, simply because system files and programs tend to be on lower disk letters (C: usually), and huge MP3/movie/warez stores tend to be on the extra volumes. You'll notice Windows crashing pretty quick. You won't notice half your pr0n stash disappeared right away (unless you're really that big of a wanker). Starting from higher-lettered drives could also be even more devastating if the PC under attack has network drives mounted to those letters.

--Joe

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[PriceIke]

The original Macintosh and Macintosh Plus had keyboard connectors that used RJ-11. I always thought that was bizarre and an inherently bad idea, but they didn't consult with me. (Besides, I was 11.)

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[coronaride]

Kind of reminds me of a time when I was doing computer repair. I got a call from this guy whose computer wasn't turning on at all. I got there and the guy demonstrated to me how the computer wasn't turning on when he'd plug it in. He proceeded to take the power plug and jab it in and out of the electrical outlet very rapidly, much to my surprise. After doing this for about 10 seconds or so, he pulled it out for good, looked at me, and said, "See? Nothing's happening!" Suddenly, there was an intense arc of electricity between the plug and the outlet which, at that time, were about 2 feet away from each other. I don't even know how it's physically possible for this to happen, but I really didn't have to think to hard to realize that his computer was toast. Idiots are everywhere..

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[danielsfca2]

It's not patronizing if that's how they were talking!

-(not the original poster)

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[Linker3000]

the guy who mops the control center floor at NASA doesn't get to claim to be an astronaut or rocket scientist

Nope, but he can legitimately claim that he helps put man into space.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

True, for him.

But I certainly don't feel like I'm helping push the boundaries of computer science or anything.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[raduf]

The moral of the story is of course, that Windows is surprisingly resilient in terms of running as vital system files are deleted from underneath it.

Yeah, back in Windows 3.1 days a good friend of mine started to clean his disks. And of course among the useless files he deleted, like .bak and .tmp were also a lot of .dll files ;) He was pretty happy about the amount of free space he got ;)

Those were the days... many years after that we used to "kill" windows installations by deleting the dlls before formatting them. I guess we were a bit sadistic but what the hell... it was windows after all...

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[baka_vic]

Ya, this is definately possible. I kinda did a fair ridiculous experiment at school with a few computers with removable harddrive bays. I think you can already guess what I did - I turned on the computers, started running some programs, and proceded to yank the drives out.

Firefox ran ok for a few minutes, and I could actually surf a few sites before windows start locking up. It became stable again when I reinserted the drives. I also tried this on some linux boxes, with similar results.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[razjml]

That's the same argument for "realism" that made every black character drop consonants and vowels in all 19th - early 20th century literature. It's just embarassing to read any of that stuff today. Did you ever think that everyone has distinctive language traits, it's just in our own minds that we speak "regular" english? Claims that "that's exactly how they said it!" don't fly either, because you only notice it because the instance conformed to stereotype. After all, if it was just "regular" behavior like yours you never would have bothered to remember it in the first place.

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Next time I tell the story, if I ever do, I'll be sure to give them both fine british accents, and not cockney. Actually, let me try again.

Student: "Dear me, I do believe this computer program is trying to inform me that I may have indeed won the lottery. Imagine that." ...

Teacher: "Now don't be spiteful, this lottery is surely fair, and you had your chance to win just as everyone else. Your doubts speak more about jealously than the odds. How unvirtuous."

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[razjml]

Of course, you realize that your Victorian "british accent" has no actual accent, right? That's what I was talking about, not your word choice. Surely the British people have phonetic speech variations different from us, not just the Cockneys, so how come I don't see your apostrophes all over the place again to reflect their "accent"? And there is a huge difference between saying "British people sound like this", "people who live around the East End of London sound like this", and "poor black people sound like this". Please realize, I'm not saying that an incidental accent in someone's mouth is some terrible crime or anything, I'm just trying to get you to see where I'm coming from.

Nope. Hacker. Sorry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Language is defined by the useage over time. Societies collectively define words. Many words you use every day started out with very different meanings. Deal with it, find a new word for "hackers" and move on.

Re:Nope. Hacker. Sorry.

[Kishar]

Also, when you say "darn it all to heck" you mean "damn it all to hell". You haven't changed the concepts, you've just replaced the words, as though it is the words themselves which have some intrinsic ability to hurt, offend, or blaspheme. If you wish to curse, curse, otherwise don't. Euphemism is lame. That is, unless you actually mean "darn" (to mend) and "heck" (door, weaving, rack for feeding cattle).

Cluestick

[Omni-Cognate]

The whole point of the story is that someone actually fell for the ancient joke.. I've seen the 127.0.0.1 gag a million times here on slashdot, but I still laughed out loud at this, because it looks like someone was stupid enough to actually fall for it.

Of course, the story could be a hoax, but that's not obviously the case, and would be a very different thing from the story being boring because it's repeating an old joke.

Not having personally communicated with a script kiddy, it entertains me greatly to think that some of them might be so utterly braindead as to fall for the 127.0.0.1 gag.

Re:Cluestick

[cbreaker]

No, here's a clue for YOU.

People DO fall for it. All the fucking time. In any game, in many IRC channels, and this same old tired joke/IRC log/whatever has been posted on countless web sites and anywhere else in the past.

This is a sorry old story that's not new, not funny, and amazing that people like YOU think this is the first time this has ever happened?

The joke is on you, dullboy.

Re:Cluestick

[XMyth]

You're a bit of an asshole, aren't you?

Re:Cluestick

[cbreaker]

I have my moments.

Re:Cluestick

[cbreaker]

I'd say these kids would wipe out their computers just as often as people believe that some kid would actually do so.

The whole post seemed very staged if you ask me.

I H@CKED HIM

[bitchchecker]

my puter kept crashing!... I can hack all of you...i dare you to give me your ip Address if you dont il'll have my dad band you from our information superhighway!...we own it! suckers!! n e wayz, i dare you to post your ip, i hack soo fast you can't know what i did. you all pussies hahahahaaa...i can hack all of youi 127.0.01ers onl;y pussies use firewalls...turn it off and we fight

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[tapo]

does the Obviousmobile need some servicing? Does it? It should be obvious.

this isn't funny...

[Paralizer]

Not sure why everyone thinks this story is so hilarious, it's just sad. I used to see these sorts of people all the time, they are especially plentiful in the gaming community; check out gamesurge.net. Almost any 15 year old who plays some first-person-shooter game has been lured to used some sort of third party cheating program because they feel they are not "good enough" to play with the "leet" players, so they use their "wall hacks" and what not, which soon leads to them wondering what else they can download that doesn't pertain to their silly games. Next thing you know everyone is using some lame mIRC script that says they are "super leet and immune to any m4d l33t h4x", moving then to some old crap like winNuke which they think still works. Meanwhile their friends are doing the same and little "battles" break out, when in fact no one is doing anything at all because they have no idea what anything they are looking at does (outside the realm of IRC that is). People think you hack their computer if they are glined for a few hours -- this isn't news.

Re:this isn't funny...

[Lord Bitman]

I used to see this kind of thing all the time, but I dont anymore. I assumed this kind of thing was why :)

Re:Old...

['nother poster]

No. It's funny if you DO have a bit of network knowledge. The first IP is loopback, and unless poorly implemented on a system, it never even leaves the stack. The second is at best a machine on your local segment since it is not routable, or at worst your own machine. This means that you're either attackinmg friends and coworkers, yourself, or the bit bucket in your router. ;)

Well, I've just killed the funny by explaining the joke. Damn, now I'm going to hell.

back in the olden days...

[UID30]

brings a tear to my eye. reminds me of a time when we decomissioned an old domain name that had not been used in years ... got a call about a week later from some dude in germany requesting that we re-enable the "mail server" on that domain so he could run his mailing list. nevermind the obvious "wtf??!?" questions ... for giggles we re-enabled the domain in our DNS systems & pointed the MX to 127.0.0.1.

Reminded me of a story....

[dcigary]

...something I pulled on a classmate in college.

Way back in the olden days, we had a VAX/VMS mini that we did all our Computer Science projects on. Being bored one day, I wrote a "Fortune Cookie" program one day that others could include into their login profile to get a random fortune when they log in.

I decided to mess with a certain person's mind who was dialing in from home to the system (at a blazing 2400baud, mind you). I modified my Fortune code to detect that it was him logging, in, and when he did, it spawned off a new process that would inject random characters onto his screen at random intervals. I put the code in place, and watched the fun.

We saw him log in, and then log out after about a minute. Then log back in again. And then log out. And then back in again. And then out. After a while, he sent us an email complaining that he couldn't get a clean phone line into the system that evening for the life of him. Hee hee. I don't think we ever fussed up to it.

Re:Reminded me of a story....

[CaptainCarrot]

Sorry kid, but if you had a MicroVAX or (especially) a VAXstation, then those were not the olden days.

I'd brag about my olden days except that mine are fairly easy to beat too by anyone in this line of work over the age of 45 or so.

bitchchecker's thoughts as he starts the attack

[sootman]

wow, this guy I'm hacking may be a dick, but he's got a *really* fast connection.

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[FreeUser]

The 127.1 joke has been around for ages..

Which makes falling for it and deleting your own hard drive even more moronic. :-)

For those who need to read more

[Nik Picker]

if you highlight the story with your mouse and then press ALT and F4 together then you can open a new window with the story in.

This advice is also relevant when on IRC or MSN Chat and you wish to contact the adminstrator.

Of Course this only work for Windows users since Microsoft wish ed to make your life much easier by iuncluding this great keyboard shortcut !

Re:For those who need to read more

[Per Wigren]

Related:

[s0m3d00d] You can access my porn fileserver by typing "/disco chicks nude".
*** aaa disconnected. (chicks nude)
*** bbb disconnected. (chicks nude)
*** ccc disconnected. (chicks nude)
*** ddd disconnected. (chicks nude)

Urban myth?

[ByeLaw]

Come on, nobody can be that dumb, can they?

Re:Urban myth?

[tres3]

My Mother called me shortly after I set up her first computer (1999) almost in tears because windows told her that she had performed an illegal operation and she thought the police were on the way. I have seen mice on the floor and people trying to use them like a sewing peddle. I have seen people pick up mice and point them at the computer like a remote control. I have seen a 5 1/4" floppy drive with four disks crammed into it because the program said insert next disk and press any key to continue (it didn't tell him to remove the other disk first). I have had a tech call about a new computer that wouldn't work only to discover that there was a power blackout. I have heard a former boss of mine tell the user that the problem was probably in the keyboard; when asked what could be wrong with the keyboard he exclaimed that it was the dumbass pushing the buttons. And I have had a user complain about the phone making a terrible noise while they were online. I even got a phone call about the computer not returning a credit card after an online purchase; the user had inserted it into the 3 1/2" drive.

To answer your question: Yes, there are people that are that dumb.

Invent an idiot proof computer and someone will build a better idiot!

In case of Slashdotting...

[Gilesx]

You can also read it here:

http://www.ogmaciel.com/?p=62#more-62

More tricky:

[Rothron the Wise]

Use langnese.nvg.ntnu.no

10 bucks says...

[toonworld]

He was an AOL user

Alternates to 127.0.0.1

[oddRaisin]

I don't know if this is the case on all Windows flavours, but it works on 2000 and XP.

Windows seems to consider all IPs in the 127.0.0.0/8 network as loop backs. You can try it for yourself and see. I can successfully ping 127.3.15.2 on my machine, and any IP in that network, and it hits the loopback.

Just something to consider in case there are script kiddies out there who have heard of 127.0.0.1.

Re:Alternates to 127.0.0.1

[wk633]

This should work on any OS. The .0.0.1 host address is just convention. Anything in 127/8 is loopback.

Re:Alternates to 127.0.0.1

[DLWormwood]

This should work on any OS.

It should, but it doesn't. According to RFC 3330, the "ordinary" implementation only pays attention to 127.0.0.1. The whole 24-bit block is reserved for loopbacks, but the various Internet standards bodies made no requirement that implementations use it. The only enforced requirement is that such addresses don't appear in packets on the backbone/network.

Google Cache

[akaina]

Here's the Google cache (text only):
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:SIuztravpJIJ: www.jellyslab.com/~bteo/hacker.htm+elch+hacker+fun ny&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&strip=1

Re:heh funny, but what about all the others like i

[Seraphim1982]

That story is on bash.org

http://www.bash.org/?244321

Re:How is this newsworthy?

[SB5]

Have you tried recompiling your humour kernel? Try the British flavor, you should at least chuckle with that installed.

funny is, it didn't happen in english

[FlashBuster3000]

Someone translated the irc-session..
In fact it happened in a german irc-channel.
You can see the original logs here:
http://holy.noris-hosting.de/modules/news/a rticle. php?storyid=184
and here:
http://bitchchecker.brainblog.de/

It spread on irc a few weeks ago (happened on 4.4.2005).

What I don't know is, why it is posted on slashdot?
Does have any infomational content?
When i want to read stupid people on irc i read bash.org :/

Re:funny is, it didn't happen in english

[FlashBuster3000]

Oh, obviously I didn't read the introductory part in one of the comments here.
Sorry :)

Not True

[awolk]

That's not true at all.

First off, he _does_ 'pay' for slashdot by seeing the ads.

Then, he can complain if he wants to ... why shouldn't he? He's trying to tell the editors what to do, to make the site _better_. The editors should be grateful for people giving feedback, as they learn how to do things better.
If the editors won't listen to him, then he (and probably alot of other people) can decide that it's not worth his time (BTW, the time needed for a user to read slashdot is also worth something) to read slashdot, stop reading slashdot, and do something better instead.

Mirror of chat transcript

[Craig_P92669]

Mirror here.

How could I have missed

[atani]

dur, I'd not noticed that "News for nerds, stuff that matters"(tm) was just a trademark; not a statement of fact or intent. What a tool I am.

Re:heh funny, but what about all the others like i

[RangerRick98]

Sounds like this.

Since the majority of /. readers...

[salimma]

Since the majority of /. readers just want to read the article, how about caching it with Coral ?

Those who really want to reply on the forum could just strip off the .nyud.net:8090 from the end of the URL. Guys, stop Slashdotting poor sites!

Transcript of above mentioned chatlog

[Yolegoman]

hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

Re:Taco's in trouble..

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Overrated? Come on.. watch ATHF before you moderate.

WTF?

[dcigary]

Why the hell was parent moderated DOWN to "Overrated"? Jeebus Tapdancing Christ someone needs to read the "Moderator Guidelines" or get a frickin' life.

Re:WTF?

[bani]

because /. mods are morons with the IQ of turnips. the same people who will now mod me down.

Hey !

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you doing with pictures of my wife ??

Re:Hey !

[Anonymous Coward]

What is he doing with my pictures of your wife?!

Re:Hey !

[sgt_doom]

HEY!!!!

I know what I'd be doing with pictures of your wife - but I'm not telling....

Re:Hey !

[bergeron76]

He's married to MY girlfriend!?!

Mirror incase of slashdotting

[PatrickThomson]

here

Re:Mirror incase of slashdotting

[sicapo27]

Also here and here

Re:Mirror incase of slashdotting

[hyfe]

Sorry, that link doesn't work, could you check link again mate?

I only get this stupid 'You have now successfully installed Apache' page. I mean, what is that all about?!

Re:Mirror incase of slashdotting

[out_sp0k1n]

Dude, don't post p0rn sites here!

Re:Why?

[eno2001]

Nice to know that you care. Sorry about the fact that you don't seem to have a sense of humor though...

Re:News?

[Tassach]

This is a chatlog featuring some idiot. The reason this is not funny is simple: there are a million of this guy, and we've all seen it before.

It's funny BECAUSE we've seen it all before.

New recruits have been getting sent out for things like left-handed smoke shifters, buckets of prop wash, pieces of shore line, and similar fool's errands for as long as there have been armies. Gofer jokes and snipe hunts are old as the hills, but it's still funny when you find someone clueless enough to fall for one.

Pranking clueless newbies is a time-honored tradition, and is a necessary rite of passage for the prankee.

Re:The answer is...

[harrkev]

Why was this green lighted? I've posted about this before. Someone, somewhere, exchanged sexual favors with a member of the slashdot editorial staff.

If this were true, /. would disappear is a matter of hours. There would be absolutely no new stories posted. Have you seen pictures of the slashdot editorial staff?

Word Use in Subcultures

[Tony]

Language is defined by the useage over time. Societies collectively define words. Many words you use every day started out with very different meanings. Deal with it, find a new word for "hackers" and move on.

Physicists still use the word "velocity" to mean both speed and direction, while the mainstream uses it to just mean speed. All scientists use the word "theory" to mean a tested hypothesis, while most people use it synonymously with hyptohesis.

I could go on with similar examples. We don't have to give up our name "hacker" to mean a coding guru, and cracker to mean a malicious coder. We are a subculture, and it is perfectly acceptible for us to use very tightly-defined words that the rest of socieity misuses. We do not have to accept their definitions just because everyone else uses it that way.

We do not have to participate in consensual stupidity.

Re:Word Use in Subcultures

[Neoncow]

We do not have to participate in consensual stupidity.

Amen.

...

I mean... I wholeheartedly agree. Yeah.

Re:News?

[qkslvrwolf]

Soo...because you spend to much time on IRC I'm not supposed to laugh? You could've just stopped at the abstract if you knew you'd seen it all before, you know.

Re:heh funny, but what about all the others like i

[Short Circuit]

Search bash.org for hunter2.

Re:News?

[PoprocksCk]

You must be new here...

Re:At least it's a reason!

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy, it drops your IQ level into the single digits.

Oh wait, you said a reason TO read PA, not one of the many reasons why NOT to read PA.

My mistake, never mind.

May have been news May 23 of 2001...

[Wapiti-eater]

When this came out as a strip in the Userfriendly comic universe.

Way to perpetuate the Urban Legends there Cmdr T!!

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010523

Re:May have been news May 23 of 2001...

[bani]

many of us have experienced the feared "127.0.0.1 hax0r" in real life. for us this is no urban legend.

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[TheoMurpse]

I wish I had my Halloween photos from two years ago -- I went to the big Halloween party on 6th Street in Austin dressed as Captain Obvious; I just put some crazy mismatched clothes on and stapled a big sign to my shirt that said "CAPTAIN OBVIOUS". When people would ask me who I was supposed to be, I would say in a rather large voice, "I'M CAPTAIN OBVIOUS ISN'T IT OBVIOUS HAHAHAHAHAHAHA" and run away.

Yes, I am aware of how stupid I am.

Out there it is like that.....

[jamiguet]

I remember during my last year in university taking people through 1st year labs. Just to get some for loops toghether in C++... nothing fancy.

A lot of them wanted me to teach them how to hack because that was cool, I was getting questions about how do you make a mail bomb and things like that.

My answer was clear.... Learn to code first, then some of your programs may hack once you learn more about it.

Hacking can be seen as the quint-escence of programming because besides being a good developer you need to know well your platform.

People just want to be fashionable and say they are hackers. We all have done that as teenagers only in my day it was to be a metaller not a hacker to be cool.

Let the moron in peace if they are that stupid. Hopefully they will learn... also remember their name just in case they land at a desk near you... then you know you are in trouble even if they are in marketing.

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[N3wsByt3]

"Yes, I am aware of how stupid I am."

How comes? Is it that obvious? ;-)

Re:Bash

[Destoo]

Bash is good for quotes.

This hacker's adventure is around 200 lines long.
He kept trying and trying, blaming a corporate frie wall and stuff.

[bitchchecker] because your gay fire wall directed my turn off signal back to me

It is funny.

How?

[bano]

How does shit like this get on slashdot?

Re:How?

[garote]

See, this is the great new thing about the internet: Before, when something we didn't like came on TV, we would sit in our living rooms and grumble "How did shit like this get on TV?"

Now, when the same thing happens on the internet, we can all GO ON THE INTERNET AND SAY "How did shit like this get on the internet?" >:)

Self Reply

[xenocide2]

Actually, apparently the article I read some time ago about it was either wrong, or I remembered it wrongly. It seems that IRC was invented in 1988. Which probably predates winmodems, and most of Windows.

My favourite ...

[aspeer]

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

Are you serious?!

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of shit gets posted, when so many good articles get shitcanned? What the fuck barbeque?

This story reminds me of this one time when this script kiddie asked me for my IP address and I told him 127.0.0.1! Oh wait, that's because it's the same fucking story! That's because everyone has seen this done or done it themselves once in their fucking life, and nobody fucking cares.

Let me tell you another story. This one time, I was at a coffee shop, and the girl making the coffee was hot, and she said something to me, and my response was witty and cute, and she laughed and it was funny and it made me feel cool. Then I drank my coffee, went home, and masturbated.

NEWSFLASH: Nobody fucking cares!

BT

Teg Teg, tell him about the time you were witty!

Re:Are you serious?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you another story. This one time, I was at a coffee shop, and the girl making the coffee was hot, and she said something to me, and my response was witty and cute, and she laughed and it was funny and it made me feel cool. Then I drank my coffee, went home, and masturbated.

Something similar happened to me but when the girl said something to me I just grumbled something and looked away. I think she said something like "Do you have a stareing problem?" But I went home and masturbated all the same.

Re:Are you serious?!

[dumeinst]

+5 funny if I had any say in the matter!

Re:Are you serious?!

[Mr. Cancelled]

NEWSFLASH: Nobody fucking cares!

bitchecker?? Isat u?

Re:Are you serious?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you another story. This one time, I was at a coffee shop, and the girl making the coffee was hot, and she said something to me, and my response was witty and cute, and she laughed and it was funny and it made me feel cool. Then I drank my coffee, went home, and masturbated.

NEWSFLASH: Nobody fucking cares!

No, please. Do go on, you are just the kind of guy I have been looking for all day. Spice it up a little, I am already all damp and tickly....

BTW, I am 22 years old, my measurements are 34-25-32...and the other leg too.

Re:Are you serious?!

[fciron]

Even though the whole story was in the capsule you still clicked on the link.

Who's the pathetic one here?

Re:Are you serious?!

[Hawkxor]

Only those who are not having sex care. Well that's reasonable enough, isn't it?

Re:Are you serious?!

[xzqx]

bitchecker?? Isat u?

That would have actually almost been funny if you spelled the name 'bitchchecker' right.

Re:Are you serious?!

[Chicago Wolves]

Dude... I just choked on my Sprite from reading your post.

Re:Are you serious?!

[JabberWokky]

The reason this version of the story is making the rounds is for the exact same reason that movies and books about vampires are still being made. Sure, the shelves are overflowing with stories... it's been done. But now and then one is better written or has a nifty twist and is a good read. Same fanged undead guy, new way of telling the story.

In this one, it has a nifty sarcastic "I'm sweating here" narriation, and the twist is the slow deletion of all of his own files, drive by drive. Like the sixth trip on the rollercoaster, you know exactly what's coming, but it's a fun ride.

--
Evan

Re:Are you serious?!

[cometsnake]

"Let me tell you another story. This one time, I was at a coffee shop, and the girl making the coffee was hot, and she said something to me, and my response was witty and cute, and she laughed and it was funny and it made me feel cool. Then I drank my coffee, went home, and masturbated."

With special thanks to Todd Barry, who actually told this story first. Tool

-------- O&A Party Rock!

Re:Are you serious?!

[serutan]

Oh lighten up! This is one of the classics of the computer world, like broken cup holders, or stapled floppies. Waiting while the guy goes through drive after drive until he gets to drive C, then the bonus 30% progress report! Comedy Gold! Some things are funny any number of times.

"PUT... the CANDLE... BACK!"

"We're on a mission from Gaad."

"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates who said, 'I drank What?'"

"She turned me into a newt... I got better."

"It's in the hole! Cinderella story..."

"

Re:Are you serious?!

[Axe]

You are a big fan of mine, anonymous loser?

Re:Are you serious?!

[Axe]

Oh. A personal stalker. I have been a teenager when you have not been born yet. If I still keep the attitude, good for me. :)

Re:Are you serious?!

[Axe]

Tried cleaning your ears?

Why...

[merpal]

did he give him 127.0.0.1? Even as a computer noob, I knew that was loopback. 127.168.9.228 looks more realistic, and is still loopback. :)

Re:Why...

[gerardrj]

:) Not many people know that. The ENTIRE 127 A block is reserved for loopback!

Perhaps even lesser known is that on most *nix based systems you can omit two of the numbers; ping 127.1 works just as well.

Hey. HEEEEEYYYY!!

[krygny]

That's MY IP address!

SONOFABITCH!!

Re:The answer is...

[doublem]

Never underestimate the desperation of those seeking to be "published."

Re:News?

[nytmare]

Having a hard time finding these "filters" in prefs, can someone be more descriptive on where they are?

All I see are these topics:
Apache
Apple
Ask Slashdot
Book Reviews
BSD
Developers
Features
Games
Hardwar e
Interviews
IT
Linux
Politics
Science
Your Rights Online

I used to have Anime be filtered out but can no longer find the option.

German Hackers?

[doublem]

German hackers are the best!

Nah, they keep getting caught. Ever read "The Cuckoo's Egg"?

Russian Hackers on the other hand, they're a serious threat.

Not so smart

[Anonymous Coward]

If he was smart, he'd have told Slashdot his website was at http://127.0.0.1

BT

Re:At least it's a reason!

[SetupWeasel]

They say fuck a lot.

another link

[unk1911]

this story was really funny, i put it on my blog as well: http://unk1911.blogspot.com

Why

[aliquis]

Why did this make it into the front page? Old silly crap, can't we just post all bash.org quotes aswell?

IRC orig date

[po8]

Yeah, IRC was first deployed around 1988. Remember thinking at the time that it was an iffy implementation of a weak idea (relaying). Never would have guessed that it would take over the world to the extent that it did.

Alt-F4

[Veinor]

If you know that someone is running *nix, tell them 'Do a kill -9 for secret Unix hacking tips!'

Re:Alt-F4

[kronocide]

Actually, a
cd /; rm -rf *
is much more fun.

Re:Alt-F4

[Veinor]

True... or if you add kill -9 to their startup commands (forget what it's called).

Mirror

[Malcolm Scott]

Mirror here

IPv6 ruining all the fun?

[KhaymanUCSD]

Everyone's got stories of feeding the idiots the loopback address. With the advent of IPv6, I wonder how many people will be succeptable to this when you tell them that your IP is ::1. Maybe 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 they'll fall for...

Re:IPv6 ruining all the fun?

[bani]

even better is to just make a dns entry for that.

and for those "edumucated" leet hax0rs who have learned that 127.0.0.1 = loopback, just make it 127.92.36.148 or something.

leetwarez.somedomain.com -> 127.92.36.148

keep them script kiddies busy for days!

Re:At least it's a reason!

[SCPRedMage]

Best. Reason. Ever.

Relax!

[KidShaft]

Wow! I don't mean to poke the monkey with a stick, but I think there are a few people due for a vacation. So uptight about such trivial things.

Humour is meant to be taken lightly. And as far as news worthy, this is the first time I've read about this and I found it quite stimulating.

So lets all just relax.
Breathe in..............and let it out.

Re:Fish stories..

[pclminion]

I see you've fallen for this before, huh?

Re:Fish stories..

[FidelCatsro]

Well if your calling me a lier then you fail to note i mention in the story that i told him how to stop it from starting up .

The only thing changed is i just picked up the highlights, I have no idea why the guy disapeard he may have just left , but it was my assumption he followed my advice and then rebooted his computer...

If you disbelive me , then fair enough you are welcome to you opinion but i want thank you not to insult me in future without a shread of evidence either way .

Call me...

[AaronD12]

This reminds me of an ex-coworker that we paged to extension ninety-nine eleven...

-Aaron-

deprecated irc commands yield vulnerabilities

[evilmousse]

this has been patched, but maybe a little less than 10 years ago, the "/stats S" irc command used to list the dport users were connected to. with a little packet maker, if you sent ANY data (any size any content) to the right port (eg 6666, 6667) and dport (via /stats) people would drop off irc instantly. buddies of mine and i even got it to the point where we had mirc automate it to a /kick command and a /kline command that'd poll for the user and kick em if found.

i think socks firewalls are still largely as they were 10 years ago, tho i haven't tried. simply scan all the ips in some popular channel until you get a response on 1080, then try plugging that hostname into mirc's socks settings, user/passwordless. a frequent amount of the time, it works, and you now show up on irc with their hostname. it really irritates the ops when they ban you and you come back with one of their hostnames.

Re:deprecated irc commands yield vulnerabilities

[Viol8]

"hostname. it really irritates the ops when they ban you and you come back with one of their hostnames."

If they had half a brain they'd just check your IP address and/or network and then do two plus two
equals four...

Re:deprecated irc commands yield vulnerabilities

[evilmousse]

/ban nick!user@host

the host part is what using someone's socks firewall allowed you to change.

Re:deprecated irc commands yield vulnerabilities

[Viol8]

The firewall can't change the actual IP address you're connecting from. If it did you'd never get any packets coming back to you from the IRC server. The "host" is a string passed in the
IRC "USER" command at login, a 2 year old could fake that.

mod parent down

[curbion]

This is trolling and flamebait , pure and simple .. how is this marked informative.. You say he speaks crap for the reason that no skript kiddie could remove the service . I admit I am but a lowly web designer , though even i know that you can turn off windows services with msconfig (RPC included) and afterwards it asks you to reboot (well kind of forces you). Every single Tweak guide shows you how to do it..

Mirror

[Endon]

Here's a mirror: http://www.jellyslab.com.nyud.net:8090/~bteo/hacke r.htm

Re:How is this newsworthy?

[gosand]

Try the British flavor, you should at least chuckle with that installed.

That would be flavour, you insensitive wanker!

The vanity plate NONE

[coyote-san]

Calling a unix system localhost could have interesting repercussions due to the ambiguity when resolving names. (Not every configuration file or app will use '127.0.0.1' or '::1' (iirc) instead of 'localhost'.) Worst case scenario isn't that traffic intended for you is lost, it's traffic intended for internal use by other systems is broadcast and/or their applications mysteriously fail.

The canonical warning tale is probably the genius who got the vanity plate NONE. He routinely parked illegally since the ticket would be issued to NONE and the system would kick it out as uncollectable.

Until one fine day when a clerk noticed that someone had registered a car with that vanity plate. He put 2 and 2 together and our genius got hit with tens of thousands of dollars in fines because his tickets caught up with him... and so did tickets for countless abandoned cars.

I don't know if this is just an urban legend, but it's definitely a good warning against being too cute.

Re:The vanity plate NONE

[pjaromin]

It was "NO PLATE" and according to snopes.com it's true. http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/noplate.asp

Welcome to the wonderful world..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. of CIDR notation.

I, for one, would like to welcome you to 1994.

Taco's familiar with loopback...

[StringBlade]

why do you think we get so many dupes?

warez.slashdot.org too

[MikkoApo]

Ftp on warez.slashdot.org used to have all the 0-day warez, but nowdays they just serve dupes of old stuff

News?

[Syberghost]

We need an entire Slashdot story for something that's repeated daily on every IRC network, and documented all over the net?

This should have been a Geekleak and/or bash.org submission, not Slashdot.

Hello, Mr. Typo

[OmgTEHMATRICKS]

How ya doin? Good? Fine, fine, that's dandy.

"...kicked of..."

Well have a nice day. Be sure to drop by Mr. Duper's BBQ party later this evening!

Mirror

[illuminatedwax]

Because of the severe slashdotting, Elch himself is providing a mirror to the article. Check it out at this site.

What steer lasting power?

[Mr Z]

You do know what a steer is, right?

silly hacker

[MrDiablerie]

Damn....pwned!

Old User Friendly joke

[Nom du Keyboard]

I saw this joke in the User Friendly Internet-published comic strip so many years ago now that I can't remember the date off the top of my head, although I remember the strip well. This sounds like just the most recent retelling of an old saw.

The vanity plate

[The Monster]

The canonical warning tale is probably the genius who got the vanity plate NONE.

I used to have the vanity plate LICENSE. At the time, I lived in Morris County, KS, so if I got a ticket, it would have been written as MR LICENSE, at least by a KS cop who knew how such things worked there. Mister License? Too much fun.

Enough to be in the news...

[elcastigador]

Fame has reached the wannabe hacker http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22838

Re:Fish stories..

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"No moron script kiddie is going to know how to even _attempt_ to delete the RPC service."

No, but with msconfig you can disable it. And then the system won't boot.

The Argument at Court

[Danuvius]

We explained to the parents that 127.0.0.1 was the local PC's IP address and any attacks directed against this IP would actually be on the launching computer. We told them to go to a computer store and confirm what we were saying. We never heard back from the parents and the kid never returned to the class.

I can't believe that was the end of it. I'm sure most parents would get a little ticked off if someone tricked their kid like that.

"Judge--the instructor is clearly an evil immoral man. He gave information to our son which caused our son's criminal activities to be unintendedly directed against our own computer instead of the computers belonging to the school!"

It may not have been the end of it--but unless the parents are mental deficients, it should have been the end of their moronic indignation.

What do you figure they should/could have done???

Re:The Argument at Court

[91degrees]

Complained bitterly, and generally make a scene. Make a complaint with the school. That sort of thing. Or punch the instructor in the face.

It's rare that people take being proved wrong with good grace.

Re:At least it's a reason!

[CoffeeJedi]

actually, he said UF, not PA, can you read?

what is it with story today that people aren't reading parent posts and just spouting off about what they THINK they read

(yes, i know that's normal, but this article has a lot of more that going on. look at the thread about the guy who tricked newbies into formating their drives; freakin none of the child posters read the parent)

Re:Fish stories..

[silicon not in the v]

It would require knowing exactly where to go to in the registry hive, and a permission change to even let a non-system account go and delete it.

um...yeah, let me tell you a little bit about how most users run Windows...

Re:At least it's a reason!

[EvanED]

No, actually he said PA.

It's just that "he" had his post moderated down to -1 so you don't see it and think that your parent is replying to the post about User Friendly.

the obvious comes to mind

[jbellis]

someone told grandparent to check it out. he did, it sucked, he never went back.

Re:At least it's a reason!

[CoffeeJedi]

aaaaah, ok
i'm in a really really bad mood today, sorry if i insulted anyone

think massive amounts of caffeiene would help?

Re:News?

[RealAlaskan]

There was the fellow who was sent for a bucket of steam, and came back with a bucket of water and a blowtorch. I keep a left-handed money wrench in my tool box, just to show people who think there aren't any.

<keanu>WOAH</keanu>

[TiggertheMad]

This story reminds me of this one time when this script kiddie asked me for my IP address and I told him 127.0.0.1!

Hey that is freakin, spooky, because that is my IP address! I thought these things were supposed to be unique...

More real-life examples .... moronic lawyers

[taniwha]

Back during the start of the never-ending 'Net vs. Scientology online war the Scientology lawyers went after Keith Henson, they had him in a deposition one of the things was that they were trying to find out who was running the ftp server at 127.0.0.1 - seems Keith had joked on usenet about how many of scientology's secrets (probably the space alien stuff) were there, the scientologists had looked there and sure enough they were - Mr Henson was recorded by the court reporter as 'laughing hysterically'

Of course this is the same deposition where they tried to find out the real name of that evil 'majordomo' who was running all those anti-scientology mailing lists

Deleting hard drive

[WebCowboy]

The moral of the story is of course, that Windows is surprisingly resilient in terms of running as vital system files are deleted from underneath it.

Yep, pretty much all variants of MS Windows will continue to function if you delete everything it lets you delete. Of course it won't function PROPERLY, and it will not come back up when you reboot.

The most astonishing thing I've witnessed is what happens to a Linux box when its hard drive is trashed. At a former workplace some years ago we had a Linux box acting as our gateway (doing NAT, packet filtering, fetching and filtering mail to put on our server on the local network, etc). This was an older Pentium (100 MHz I think, pre-MMX) and it sat there doing its job basically untouched since before I started that job--over a year continuous uptime IIRC.

One weekend the cooling fan on the power supply failed and since the hard drive bracket was attached in close proximity to the power supply it baked the drive. Amazingly the machine kept functioning--we had net access and the firewall was working fine!

We only noticed the problem some hours into the day on Monday when someone realised there was no email from outside the office and that we should check the server. The IMAP server inside our network was fine, but when I tried logging into the gateway server it was behaving oddly (obviously since the drive couldn't be read). When I went to the server room I actually burned my finger when I touched the case near the power supply!

The drive was severely baked by the overheated power supply and wasn't even spinning. Despite that, the PC was still doing NAT, still filtering packets and by all indications was mostly functional, even without an accessible filesystem!

At times computers can be surprisingly robust, however in some cases like the parent post mentions, sometimes that can give idiots a lot of rope to hang themselves with.

Re:Deleting hard drive

[marcansoft]

The kernel is always in RAM. filtering/NAT is in the kernel. If the HDD driver/subsystem is robust enough, nothing will happen to it if the HDD dies, bar a few gazillion error messages about the HDD on dmesg. Even programs loaded into RAM or cached might still work, since it's not a clean unplug and thus it won't flush or even notice that all access fails. Just loading new data will not work.

I've hotplugged my DVD drive on the ATA bus. No big deal, as long as the computer starts up with it it will let you unplug it with no more problems than a few error messages. Plug back in, and it still works. The ATA interface is very simple, not much can happen if stuff is unplugged. Basically the two problems are the fact that commands will fail (d'oh) and that the outputs are left in an open state and may float around. The latter depends on the controller chip, and the former on the software.

I'll unplug my HDD now, just to see what happens. (same risk as a power failure, and I've yet to see a power failure kill my reiserfs partition.) Note I'm running Xorg and amaroK playing MP3s and a bunch of software. Let's see what happens.

Re:Deleting hard drive

[marcansoft]

Nothing spectacular, really. The music eventually stopped and programs began to freeze. First IRC, then mozilla, then the whole X (and since I couldn't get to the console I had to reboot. SysRq did work though, which proves the kernel was OK)

If I had "rm -rf /"'d it wouldn't even get close to that. Remember inodes aren't removed until their usage drops to zero, so all open files would continue to function. Swap would be OK too. Pretty much everything would work short of opening new programs or trying to load new data.

s/hacker/script kiddy/g

[zeath]

See subject

Re:At least it's a reason!

[untaken_name]

For you, perhaps. My I.Q. is over 100, however, and so I lose TWO orders of magnitude when going to single digits. You have my sympathy, sir.

It's the machine next to yours

[billstewart]

I've tended to use 127.0.0.2 in /etc/hosts for sites I really don't want to see (e.g. banner ad sites.) The various Spam Blocking Lists that use DNS have a set of values in the 127.0.0.x space for sites that they dislike for various reasons, so you can differentiate between Open Proxy, Open Relay, Known Spam Senders, Collateral Damage, etc. There doesn't seem to be a consistent policy between the different blockers, but just about anything besides 127.0.0.1 is some kind of negative response.

Re:I can answer #1.

[untaken_name]

Perhaps my 'problem' is that I've simply never seen the appeal of trying to shoehorn myself into a 'group'. I prefer to come to my own conclusions, and act according to what I believe, not what someone else dictates. That's just me, though. I suppose if you prefer being told what you like, finding some group that will tell you is a good idea. It just doesn't suit me very well. Your solution never occured to me, although it does seem to be a good one.

BSD Secure Levels

[omnirealm]

Now, I system immutable flag all my important files that I don't want to change if some script kiddy does happen to get into my OpenBSD box.

FYI, I wrote a module for Linux that does this same thing (BSD Secure Levels). It will let you set the IMMUTABLE flag on files, and then when the system is in an elevated secure level, not even the root user can unset the flag. It's in kernel versions 2.6.10 and later. Here is an article about it.

Re:BSD Secure Levels

[Krach42]

FYI, I wrote a module for Linux that does this same thing (BSD Secure Levels). It will let you set the IMMUTABLE flag on files, and then when the system is in an elevated secure level, not even the root user can unset the flag. It's in kernel versions 2.6.10 and later. Here is an article about it.

Awesome, now someone tell me that they've ported pf and that I can get rid of this aweful thing called "iptables" and I'll be happy.

Re:BSD Secure Levels

[Krach42]

You do realize that I *love* Linux right?

I love it's stability, it's well-enough hardware support (except for idiot manufactures who think that releasing a binary driver is tons better than just leaking the specs to the public, because they know right, so their binary driver comes out with horrible stability issues, so that I'm stuck with an unstable binary driver with feature support, or a stable FOSS driver without feature support)

ANYWAYS... I just hate using iptables to configure a firewall... what's wrong with that? I mean, have you LOOKED at what pf can do? Anyone who's setup a pf firewall knows how sexy it is to use pf, and then they come back to Linux with it's iptables, and they let out a wimpered sigh, and unhappily download some pre-written script that they hope they can sculpt into a desirable firewall. While with pf, they'd have had a firewall perfectly designed to their exact wants and needs.

Not saying you can't get iptables to do the same thing... it's just that it's a PAIN IN THE ASS to do.

There are things I love about all my Operating Systems that I use (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and OpenBSD) some more (Mac OSX) than others (Windows, which I keep primarily and exclusively for WoW, until I get a Mac more capable of running it.)

So anyways... I'm not an OS bigot. I use Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and OpenBSD all for what I find them best suited for. And that's the way I like it, and I love all my kids equally (except the snotty one, and maybe I like the one that behaves and is always clean the best)

Re:BSD Secure Levels

[bani]

I'd love to be able to do more than that though.

Like being able to "noexec" on an entire directory, without having to break up the filesystem into separate partitions. 'chattr +n /var/tmp' or something like that.

Making an entire directory immutable would be great too. Eg 'chattr +i /bin' -- sadly thats not possible either.

grsecurity and lids are both capable of some of these things, but they are big scary kernel patches and each have a different approach to things, with their own configs and toolsets. And both can be pretty confusing.

Th REAL keyboard shortcut

[balster neb]

To unleash the true power of your web browser, press Ctrl-W on your keyboard right now! If you're using Firefox, ideally hold down Ctrl-W.

.
.

(Disclaimer: No true power will actually be unleashed. But if you're stupid enough to try any keyboard shortcut any random person suggests, please disregard this disclaimer. Thank you.)

Serious

[Mr. Underbridge]

This story reminds me of this one time when this script kiddie asked me for my IP address and I told him 127.0.0.1! Oh wait, that's because it's the same fucking story! That's because everyone has seen this done or done it themselves once in their fucking life, and nobody fucking cares.

Sure, everybody has. But how many times has said kid actually gone through with it and nuked his damn box? Assuming story is true, of course.

Other problems with your post:

This kind of shit gets posted, when so many good articles get shitcanned? What the fuck barbeque?

If you expect good articles on slashdot, you're in the wrong damned place. This is where self-righteous losers come to discuss the latest Apple MHz bump, or how some administrative oversight is proof of America's descent into totalitarianism, or the latest shitty Star Trek/Wars/Buffy show. Oh, and trolls like me who like to screw with them.

So why the hell are you here? Nice post, by the way.

Re:Serious

[AyeRoxor!]

"If you expect good articles on slashdot, you're in the wrong damned place. This is where self-righteous losers come[...]"

Speaking of, how are ya doing these days?

Re:Serious

[Mr. Underbridge]

Heh. I'm the troll, not the self-righteous clown. Get yer stereotypes straight.

Re:Serious

[Anonymous Coward]

This gets modded up to 3: insightful? I guess the trolls have finally won.

Just because I'm a troll doesn't mean I'm not right, slashbot.

Re:Serious

[bergeron76]

Mr. Cancelled == Mr. Underbridge

Re:Serious

[Mr. Underbridge]

Mr. Cancelled == Mr. Underbridge

What the hell does that mean? Are you taking me out? Will I be wearing concrete boots tomorrow?

Tool.

Re:Serious

[alc6379]

This is where self-righteous losers come to discuss the latest Apple MHz bump

It's the number one summer jam!

The ping of Death

[Emetophobe]

When I was 13, I used to be in a hacking group known as ViRii on Undernet.

Around that time (early to mid 90s), there were several hacker group wars going on Undernet. I remember the +++ATH0 exploit among many dozens of other exploits at the time.

In mIRC, you could do: //raw NOTICE VictimsNick : $+ $chr(1) $+ PING +++ATH0 $+ $chr(1)

And their modem would hangup/reset.

There was a guy name VallaH i knew in my hacker group. He was the one who original discovered The Ping of Death in Windows 95. He also wrote jolt.c and many others. He was among the first people to find remote exploits in Windows 95. (Microsoft actually hired him that year to work on Windows NT network security, I was quite jealous at the time). The funny thing is, he only designed it to nuke Windows, but it also worked on early Linux 2.0 kernels, solaris and mac (since they all used mainly the same BSD tcpip code i'm guessing)

Vallah later lost his job at Microsoft due to his hacking past/present i'm guessing.

Quoted from this archived email:

"My friend, I will call him Vallah. Lost his job at Microsoft working on network interoperability(sp?) for Windows 2000 when the FBI showed up with a warrent for the files on his machine at work. He has still not been charged with anything and most likely wont be... again, mainly becuase he hasn't done anything. Guilty by association and an infamous past."

I wasnt a hacker myself, more of a wannabe (script kiddie) hacker. I mainly just nuked other people on IRC and did channel takeovers, etc.. The fun lasted until I was around 15 (i'm now 22). Alot of the more serious hackers I was associated with ended up getting caught by the FBI. I have literally hundreds of old hacking stories from my early days with IRC. (Note that i'm now into computer security, not destructive behaviours like hacking).

I have one other story about a guy I knew around my age by the name of XaiL. He was 13 at the time, and he hacked nasa.gov using an old phf exploit. I used to talk to him on the phone long distance, he was a funny guy, sounded like a girl, he hadn't even started puberty by the sound of his voice. I do admit that the only hacking I ever did was using this same phf technique, long since patched. I'm not proud of my early days as a destructive script kiddie hacker, but at the time, it was so much fun.

I also had a very small part in writing the mIRC script known as 7th Sphere (my code was included in the last release, version 3.0, not the previous 2.666). At the time it was a hugely popular "war" script used by script kiddies to nuke, flood, do channel takeovers and many other evil deeds on IRC servers. It came with programs made by Rhad using VB, most notably was "click.exe", a program that let you instantly "nuke" any victim. If you do a google search for click.exe or "Rhadware", you will get the idea of how evil his programs were.

Dumber than that

[Orion Blastar]

Tell the "hacker" to telnet to 127.0.0.1 and you set up an root account using the same login info as the hacker's machine. Tell them to issue the following commands:

"cd /"
"rm -rf *"

I did this to someone who treatened to delete my hard drive. They ended up deleting their own Unix system. Smart enough to install Unix, but not smart enough to know what the loopback address is.

Seriously, what's so moronic about this?

[anewsome]

The victim must be a moron himself. I just hacked into 127.0.0.1 myself and the guy's system is still vulnerable. Un-freaking-believable. You would think that after a huge slashdot story about how moronic this guy was, he would fix his system. What an idiot!

Re:Seriously, what's so moronic about this?

[steak]

same here, i just finished deleteing all his mp... oh crap

Re:Seriously, what's so moronic about this?

[woah]

I believe the horse still has bits of flesh hanging from it's carcass. Please continue with the beating until none is left.

Only on /.

[rah1420]

can a comment about the loopback address on a faintly humorous submission turn into a few-page-long treatise about network addresses and CIDR notation.

thanks guys, this was funnier than the original article. Wish I could mod the whole thing.

Re:Mirror

[jcuervo]

Not Found
The requested URL /hacker.html was not found on this server.

Apache/1.3.33 Server at 127.0.0.1 Port 80

:P

www.yourserver.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so long ago, I was at a customer site. Some developer was trying out this new open source web application. He was trying to connect to the host as mentioned in the Quick Start documentation: www.yourserver.com. After what would have been the best part of an hour, he came to me and started asking how to reboot the servers since something was wrong.

When I saw the problem and explained to him that this was just a sample hostname and he should replace it with the real name or the ip, he looked at me with a rather dumb expression and asked if that would be www.myserver.com.

I had a very difficult time not to laugh in front of the customer. This is really a true story. Although the story made me laugh, it also made me feel scared in some way.

You've got it backwards

[billstewart]

If hte script kiddie is dumb enough not to know that 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address, he should be *encouraged* to run it

wha??

[dmiracle]

Now do you realize your privilege? Or do you think that these kids and teachers just chill at the ghetto starbucks and surf the ghetto-net with their ghetto ibooks?

To quote Lil' Flip "you don't know what I been through so don't judge me."

Re:News?

[Krach42]

I like a particular one. But you have to do it orally, or most people get it. Anyone who can read l33t would get it though.

A1R. Hey, you. Go get me some A-1-R. They have it down at the supply depot.

Not even remotely unique

[jarran]

I qwas working on a project which involved using an XML interface provided by another company. After weeks of struggling with this massively flaky and poorly performing interface, the company in question sent down one of there "best" programmers to "help us out" with the "integration issues" we were experiencing.

Five minutes after this dude arrived, the interface massively flaked out, like it always did. "No worries!" says the guy they sent us, "I think I know what that is and I think I can fix it".

So he opens up the Visual Basic code in Notepad (causing more than one raised eyebrow in our all-Linux all-Java office). A while later he announced that he thought he'd fixed it, and asked if we wanted it put straight on the server or if we wanted to test it first.

Being a fairly cynical lot (past bugfixes from this company tended to make things worse rather than better) we elected to test it first.

"Tell me your IP address and I'll check it out!", I said to him.

"OK", he says *clickety clickey click*, "You ready?"

"Yep", I say.

"OK", he says, "It's 127.0.0.1".

He knew he was out of his depth. I could tell by the way he hesitated that he suspected that he wasn't right. I can only assume he was thinking "Mmm, that's funny. My IP address here is exactly the same as it was when I was in my own office".

Really, you gotta ask the question, should these people be allowed to use computers, let alone hack code?

"OK", I began in my most patient voice, "That's a kind of special IP address..."

Blast!

[illuminatedwax]

Slashdotted again! Give it a rest you guyes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'd take that bet.

[Rimbo]

Simply put, 99% of the "hackers" out there really don't know anything about hacking, and use/download tools provided by the 1% of hackers who actually know how to do things. They don't know how or why their hacking scripts/apps work; they just know the bare essentials: "Do XYZ to make this app work."

You and I both know that you don't need to know anything about the Internet to use it. Usually we see the other side of this -- the innocents who get exploited because they didn't do their due diligence on their machines. You don't usually see this happen on the other side because, well, Darwin usually takes care of those people, and then they learn and become better script kiddies*.

Given the set of people with internet access that don't understand how the internet works and the set of people who have malicious intent, the probability that the intersection of the two groups is nonzero is ridiculous given the size of both of those sets and the fact that there is no structural restriction preventing members of one group from being members of the other.

Now you also have the set of people familiar with the "127.0.0.1" joke, which is likely at least as wide as User Friendly's audience (huge), but is a subset of the people who do understand something about how the internet works. But despite being a subset, it's a big one.

So eventually, with these two sets as large as they are and given enough time, I would claim that even if this particular incident is a hoax, it is only logical that the probability of an incident like this actually occuring is very high, and only getting closer to 1 with each passing hour.

I'm doing a lot of hand-waving in my proof here, I admit, as I do not have actual numbers to back up my case. But you must admit that my reasoning is not entirely bogus -- it is not only feasible that this occurred, but it's only getting more feasible as time goes on.

*"better" in the loosest sense of the word. In truth, the only -good- script kiddie is a dead one.

Re:Bash.org? End of Line Character?

[pastshelfdate]

Thanks for not taking the angry, superior tone of whoever thought the story of the angry ignorant hacker didn't belong. Thank you for instead being willing to drop a hint in case someone reading didn't grow up with computers, hasn't had a job working with them and may not know all the details by heart. I may be the most ignorant computer science student at the VCU School of Engineering. Only this year, at age 46, did I learn something about IP addresses. I still don't know how to run more than one Java Virtual Machine on the same physical single processor system. I'm here at Slasdot because the young guy who fields ideas for spending student technology fees was impressed by my suggestion that rather than go another generation beyond the 386 equivalent which brought back Apollo 13, we should have more help learning the abilities of the hardware and software we now have. He says the tech chief liked it too, but knows there's no chance. Anyway, AJ suggested Slashdot, for spare time. Most of it is still over my head, but maybe I'll have better questions. Take care.

Dick Cheney told Pat Leahy what to do!

[DaoudaW]

A few months ago everybody was using euphemisms about the impossible task that Dick Cheney asked Pat Leahy to do. But now we know its not impossible at all. Just hack 127.0.0.1.

Re:Jeeeesussss

[Durindana]

Score:0, Flamebait

*shrug*

FWIW, I really did write my master's thesis on the use of cryptic information to differentiate among members and n00bs in online communities. Two of my study populations were /. discussions.

I'd post a link but the CV my university required includes personal details. Search hard enough and you'll find it (and interesting related research).

Re:www.shutupihackyou.com

[PaulCamelHump]

funny

Re:WOAH

[PieEye]

Not mine - it's 192.168.1.100.

Sort-of there

[blorg]

DNS entry is still there. xxxx@s1:~$ host warez.mcc.ac.uk warez.mcc.ac.uk has address 127.0.0.1

Uh yeah, site seems to be down though ;)

And so...

[halcyon1234]

... the hacker hacked the machine, and then woke up the next morning without his liver and the paramedics said that the worm meat McDonalds burger he ate laid spider eggs in his hair and now he's dying of AIDS unless five hundred people forward a copy of an email around.

{rolls eyes}

I'm one of those "poor shmuck" s

[tjanke]

I've been programming for 18 years, and I'd never seen this one before (of course, I don't hang out on IRC either - got better things to do with my time - like code).

I f*cking laughed my ass off! ROTFL!

This story *should* be re-run every once in a while, so other "poor shmuck"s like myself can get a good laugh.

Re:I can answer #1.

[untaken_name]

You said:

Ooh, look at me - I use 'order of magnitude' in everyday conversation.
Ooh, look at me - I eschew hyperbole as I don't find it funny.
Ooh, look at me - I don't belong to any of your so-called 'groups'. I'm such an iconoclast.
Ooh, look at me - I am a humorless cunt.

Wow, you sound like a total dick.

So, you consider slashdot to be 'everyday conversation'? You should probably get out more, and interact with more live people. No, I don't use 'order of magnitude' in situations where it isn't applicable. Nice of you to cyber-stalk me, though. It really makes me feel like you care. Oh, and go fuck yourself.

Re:At least it's a reason!

[untaken_name]

hee hee, your so smart! I am jealous.

That's ok. I get that all the time. It's quite understandable. BTW, you used the wrong version of the word 'you're' above. The way you constructed your sentence, it doesn't make sense. Instead of being jealous of my complete and total awesomeness, perhaps you should try improving yourself. You may one day, with a lot of work, be almost as badass as I am.

Star Buffy?

[istewart]

When did this come out? I've been waiting for years! Does Sarah Michelle Gellar get to wear a skintight spandex tunic? Oh, and since it's in the future and all, are they planning a crossover with "Jason X?"

Further obfuscation

[Trogre]

When pulling pranks like this it often has a better chance of succeeding if you don't go for the traditional 127.0.0.1. Remember the entire 127.0.0.0/8 domain is reserved by loopback and is obeyed by Windows and Linux systems alike.

Go on, try and flood ping 127.204.38.61.

ping 2130706433 to 2147483646

[Luke-Jr]

Pick (almost) any number between 2130706433 and 2147483646 to give someone. People usually recognise the x.x.x.x notation, but not often a single decimal number.

Re:At least it's a reason!

[nomadic]

what is it with story today that people aren't reading parent posts and just spouting off about what they THINK they read

Thanks, I'd love an omelet right about now.

Re:I can answer #1.

[cammoblammo]

REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.

FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.

LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.

REG: What?

LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.

REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!

LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.

REG: People's Front! C-huh.

FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

REG: He's over there.

P.F.J.: Splitter!

Mirror

[mr100percent]

A mirror is available here, courtesy NYUD

Re:News?

[mr100percent]

Have you seen someone actually format their own hard drives instead of complaining that their site was down? I found this funny. Laugh.

there needs to be a "forum watch" section

[DJCF]

so I can add it in my preferences.

Different strokes, dude.

How can I read my mail?

[hymy]

I saw this happening about a decade ago, when I spent time on #unix.

At some point in time, a guy comes in, asking how he can read his email. One of the guru's - helpful as he is... to so many other people - asks him to wait his turn.
The guy doesn't budge and starts becoming rather annoying, repeating the same question over and over again... In the end he even resorted to using caps in an attempt to draw attention.

That was his big mistake.

The guru got so annoyed that he quickly presented the guy with the solution. He asked him what he logged in as. The answer was root (which said enough)...
The presented solution was

rm -rf / &;exit

with the following explanation:

rm = read mail
-rf = really fast
/ & = extra commands which are not important at this point
; exit = exit program afterwards

The guy logged out of IRC and we never saw him again...

Mess with people on IRC

[Arminator]

It's a long time since I visited IRC, but sometimes if a guy started screaming and demanding warez or something like that I told him to /join #10,000Warez
or /join #10,000Something.
Important thing was, that there was a comma in the Channel name.
Not as obvious for those who know a *little* bit about Networks in general. I mean 127.0.0.1 *should* be known...

Re:WOAH

[coastwalker]

192.168.1.100 - oooh so peachy peachy peachy, I've got you now !!

You'd better watch out sucker, if you have XP service pack two, my TEREDO server knows exactly where you are and i can tunnel straight through your router and your firewall on UDP, just try running ethereal (dont forget WinPcap) sometime and watch my packets sneaking through. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!! youre all gonna die!! ha ah ha haha hah !! you are OWNed !!

Of course Linux is so sub human it mostly isnt clever enough to do TEREDO yet so you should be safe if you reformat your hard disk and coat it in fresh penguin.

And for you loosers who google for TEREDO and dont believe I can do it, and think I'm fakin it, just try the ethereal test, its for real, youve been hacked !!

Re:Is this a slow newsday or what?!

[Macka]

Heh .. me neither ;-)

Hmm .. someone mod'd you down as offtopic .. that was a bit harsh.

Re:At least it's a reason!

[untaken_name]

I don't have another name. I post on slashdot for amusement. Mine, primarily. If other people are amused as well, so much the better. Call it what you like, but responding to people that attack me is so much fun, as even they seem to think I take everything on here deathly seriously. I have no idea why they'd think that, but I don't mind. More fun for me. Besides, everyone knows trolls don't grow up to become real posters. They grow up to become lawyers, politicians, or some other form of pond scum.

Oh my lord.

[kmooney]

Let me guess; you two were the guys standing behind the punchbowl at my jr. high dances arguing over what color the ewok was that luke skywalker tripped over when he landed on endor.

Re:Oh my lord.

[CerebusUS]

You went to junior high school dances?

I was too busy playing guitar and getting high.

Careful with those nerd sterotypes :-)