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Microsoft Patches 1990s-Era 'Ping of Death'

Posted by Soulskill on from the better-late-than-never dept.

CWmike writes "Microsoft on Tuesday issued 13 security updates that patched 22 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Windows, Office and other software, including one that harked back two decades to something dubbed 'Ping of Death.' While other patched vulnerabilities we more serious, one marked 'CVE-2011-1871' brought back memories for nCircle's Andrew Storms. 'This looks like the Ping of Death from the early-to-mid 1990s,' he said. 'Then, when a specially-crafted ping request was sent to a host, it caused the Windows PC to blue screen, and then reboot.' Two decades ago, the Ping of Death (YouTube video demonstration) was used to bring down Windows PCs remotely, often as a way to show the instability of the operating system."

128 comments

  1. umm by newton62 · · Score: 1, Informative

    better late then never!

    --
    newton62 (56617) Karma: Bad
    1. Re:umm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What?

      First late, then never? And that's better than what?

    2. Re:umm by devphaeton · · Score: 1

      *than.

      Otherwise, true that.

      --


      do() || do_not(); // try();
    3. Re:umm by Hylandr · · Score: 1

      Does anyone know if Back Oriface works on Win 7?

      - Dan.

      --
      ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
    4. Re:umm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The backdoors in W7 are now technically harder to access but there are even more than ever - particularly if Office, Flash and .NET are installed also. Fortunately the tools are now more sophisticated too, and it's no harder to anonymously remote-admin a Windows box than it ever was.

    5. Re:umm by Old+Sparky · · Score: 0

      HowTF is this offtopic?!?
      Slashdot moderators are all Microsoft shills!!!

  2. I remember the ping of death by Osgeld · · Score: 0

    It really didn't do much unless your bombing your buddies dialup server, and thus tying up your dialup line. I guess it could be slightly annoying if you could get a shit ton of people to do it today

    1. Re:I remember the ping of death by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      If your friend was on dialup why not just do the ++ATH0 ping? Oh the fun I had with that.

    2. Re:I remember the ping of death by CanEHdian · · Score: 2
      quote>If your friend was on dialup why not just do the

      NO CARRIER

      --
      When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
    3. Re:I remember the ping of death by adolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I remember a few variations.

      One, of course, was ping -f from a sufficiently fast pipe (or just an equally-slow pipe with better buffer management). I had a custom REXX script under OS/2 which took a username as input, and would finger each of the terminal servers of a local ISP, derive the IP address of that user, then issue a ping -f for that particular dialup user.

      It would cause their PPP sessions to timeout, at which point they'd disconnect. And it was fun, because I actually knew the people who I was disconnecting.

      Tougher (or farther) targets at other hosts would get a ping -f from a blistering-fast (hah!) shared FreeBSD machine with a T1 connection. If -f didn't do it alone, increasing the packet size always did. Sometimes, it seemed that different packet sizes (not just larger ones) would make it happen sooner.

      Around the same time, it was discovered (not by me) that sending an ICMP ping packet containing "+++ATH0" would instantly disconnect any user with a cheap modem by very neatly instructing their modem to do exactly that.

      This worked because Hayes (rest their souls) had a patent on requiring a one second delay between +++ (aka "enter command mode") and any subsequent commands (ATH0 hangs up the modem). Makers of cheap modems wanted to pay as few royalties as possible, and they got their wish.

      On most premium modems, or most old modems, it wasn't a problem, since it was required to have a delay between "+++" and any other command. But during the early winmodem days, it was a blast: Those cheap modems instantly dropped to command mode, and immediately executed anything after that.

      You tell it to hang up, and that's just what it does.

      It wasn't even really necessary to use ATH0, either: any old AT command would work, and would leave the modem in command mode instead of data mode. +++ATLM2L3, for instance, would result in a lot of noise from the modem speaker until their session timed out...

      The ATH0 trick could be accomplished with IRCII using /ctcp [target] PING +++ATH0 or more generally with ping -p 2B2B2B41544829 [target IP or hostname] from a suitable *nix host.

      It was fun being a kid back then, with OS-agnostic ways to be annoying. (I've grown up just slightly since then...)

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
    4. Re:I remember the ping of death by oztiks · · Score: 1

      My favorite of them all ... /topic #l33t Press Alt + F4 for Ops.

    5. Re:I remember the ping of death by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Informative

      It really didn't do much unless your bombing your buddies dialup server, and thus tying up your dialup line. I guess it could be slightly annoying if you could get a shit ton of people to do it today.

      I don't know what you are talking about, but it certainly isn't the ping of death. Maybe ping flooding? I personally wrote the patch for a now long defunct unix variant which fixed the actual "Ping of Death" vulnerability.

      The way it worked was to send a ping with a 65536 byte payload - technically out of spec for the ICMP protocol by about 30 bytes in length. Since it was out of spec, most IP stacks were written with the assumption that it could never happen. But when it did happen, you got a buffer overflow that would usually panic the OS immediately. At the time, almost every OS on the net was vulnerable even the guys who didn't have BSD-derived stacks like MS Windows.

      So all it took was one single oversized-sized icmp ping to crash just about any computer on the net. Imagine being able to take down all of google's internet presence with just a few thousand packets. Of course, at the time, there was no google.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    6. Re:I remember the ping of death by Sun · · Score: 2

      So all it took was one single oversized-sized icmp ping to crash just about any computer on the net. Imagine being able to take down all of google's internet presence with just a few thousand packets. Of course, at the time, there was no google.

      Technically, you needn't send the whole thing. You couldn't send the whole thing, anyways, as there are limits on the size of an IP packet. You sent the packet in IP fragments. You needn't even send all of the fragments. Merely sending the last fragment, the one that overflowed the IP packet size.

      Also, IIRC, it wasn't 65536. It was bigger. Maximal size was ~65506+your MTU (which was never less than 536, and was often 1500) which caused the overflow. 65536 total size is still okay (or is it 65535?)

      Shachar

    7. Re:I remember the ping of death by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Social engineering at it's best.

      Also, the song "The Final Countdown" is now playing in your head.

    8. Re:I remember the ping of death by bipbop · · Score: 1

      Doesn't work if it's Hayes-compliant, because of the guard timer after +++. They needed a crappy out-of-spec (usually win)modem for that, and some people had them, but just being on dialup didn't guarantee it.

    9. Re:I remember the ping of death by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 1

      Technically, you needn't send the whole thing. You couldn't send the whole thing, anyways, as there are limits on the size of an IP packet. You sent the packet in IP fragments. You needn't even send all of the fragments. Merely sending the last fragment, the one that overflowed the IP packet size.

      Yeah, it was really just convenience to use ping since anyone could run it and most OSes would happily do the illegal fragmentation for you.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    10. Re:I remember the ping of death by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      True,

      But in addition, just don't think about your breathing.

    11. Re:I remember the ping of death by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just posting to undo an accidental moderating.

    12. Re:I remember the ping of death by Xest · · Score: 1

      The Ping of Death had nothing to do with bandwidth flooding, it was a packet that would instantly just crash Windows as is quite clearly mentioned in the summary. It wouldn't matter if you were on a 14.4 modem, or a 1gbps pipe. It'd still crash vulnerable versions of Windows straight away.

    13. Re:I remember the ping of death by MarkRose · · Score: 1

      I've never seen someping so delightfully evil.

      --
      Be relentless!
    14. Re:I remember the ping of death by sjames · · Score: 1

      That was actually one of the early patent problems. Hayes wanted a significant royalty to implement the guard timer.

    15. Re:I remember the ping of death by VincenzoRomano · · Score: 1

      Really?
      That won't ever work unless your friend was using some brain damaged modem.

      --
      Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
      For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
    16. Re:I remember the ping of death by c · · Score: 1

      At the time, almost every OS on the net was vulnerable even the guys who didn't have BSD-derived stacks like MS Windows.

      The main difference being that when the Ping 'o Death became public knowledge, patches were available for all the free OSes... I read about it on BUGTRAQ, tested it against random Linux boxes in my office, then had every public-facing system patched and re-tested before lunch (which, those days, was about 50 minutes after I made it to the office).

      The POD was one of the first incidents where the suits I worked with started looking at this open source model as maybe being a bit more than just something to "explore" to keep the geeks amused.

      --
      Log in or piss off.
    17. Re:I remember the ping of death by Tomato42 · · Score: 1

      Brain damaged == Any modem under $50

    18. Re:I remember the ping of death by Osgeld · · Score: 1

      clearly in the summary that also states "something called the ping of death" what they are calling the ping of death isnt the ping of death on the other side of the country, and it didnt have much to do with bandwidth flooding it was about dumping so much shit into their system at once it would crack and possibly give you an entry vector, but it was worthless a decade ago cause post 486 days you had enough horsepower to just chew through it

    19. Re:I remember the ping of death by Meeni · · Score: 1

      And when ping of death got fixed, we just found that other vulnerability in the IP fragmentation stack, when sending two forged IP packets fragmented to be just larger than the MTU when reassembled, all hells were loose. Worked on pretty much anything this one...

    20. Re:I remember the ping of death by ShakaUVM · · Score: 2

      Pingflooding dialup users was like shooting ducks in a barrel.

      Personally, I loved messing with my friends by echoing TTY control codes into their (heh) world-writable dev/tty file. If you wanted to be a dick, you could just pipe a binary file into it, which basically made their session unusable, but it was much more fun to change their font or temporarily blank their screen.

      Xwindows games were fun, too. Very little security back in the day meant you could play audio files to come out of their speakers (always fun to play embarassing songs when they're near other people) or launch xv with a photo of Mike Tyson biting off an ear when they're chatting up a girl. Xscreensaver was always fun to launch, too, on someone else's session.

    21. Re:I remember the ping of death by adolf · · Score: 1

      Pingflooding dialup users when you, yourself, were on dialup was not always the most trivial thing in the world: Theoretically, I only had a 28.8 or 33.6 upstream, and they the same. It should not have worked at all, but it did at least for Linux and Windows [Trumpet Winsock] users.

      I had other OS/2 using friends, back then, and we couldn't really touch eachother...whether with the same ISP, or a different one: Things would get very slow, but not fail. (I did not have the tools or knowledge to sort out this OS-dependent discrepancy back then.)

      ANSI / VT100 codes were also fun, on IRC at least, but a clever person would quickly figure out how to restore things to sanity. (Most didn't, but the social aspects of IRC made it have limited utility since I usually liked the channels in which I was abusing folks.)

      I never tried dumping stuff into another user's /dev/tty: Though I'm sure it would've been interesting, I really liked the FreeBSD shell account I was using and it had competent admins who I didn't want to give a reason to get rid of me. )

      But X, with sound? Dude: It's half-past 2011, and audio with X are still completely different entities, with sound being a complete crapshoot. I don't want to doubt you, so I'll just ask: How did you make that work? Have I missed something in the past 16 years?

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
    22. Re:I remember the ping of death by ShakaUVM · · Score: 1

      >>But X, with sound? Dude: It's half-past 2011, and audio with X are still completely different entities, with sound being a complete crapshoot. I don't want to doubt you, so I'll just ask: How did you make that work? Have I missed something in the past 16 years?

      This was in a workstation lab, where people are all sshd into a unix host. You do a who, see what host they're on, then you ssh into their individual host, and then xaudio by default will play things right out of their speakers. To launch xwindows apps, you just added the -display 0:0 tag to xv or whatever.

      >>I never tried dumping stuff into another user's /dev/tty: Though I'm sure it would've been interesting, I really liked the FreeBSD shell account I was using and it had competent admins who I didn't want to give a reason to get rid of me. )

      Yeah, the ttys were traditionally world-writable to enable programs like talk to work. So you could just cat files right into people's ttys, or just type small messages ("I love you" or "}}}" appearing in the middle of their code was always amusing) and they couldn't do anything about it. The sysadmins eventually set things up so that you couldn't just write into a tty directly, but IIRC they made talk suid 0, so if you wanted to piss off your buddy, you could just write a small shell script to constantly spawn talk requests to his console.

      My friends and I had a lot of fun in computer labs. Woe unto the person that didn't xlock their console. =)

  3. POD has long since been patched. by atlasdropperofworlds · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just FYI, the POD doesn't affect any modern OSes. It used to bring down Windows NT (and earlier), early linux kernels, as well as Mac OS 7 back in the day.

    1. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

      You're forgetting about the part where Microsoft wrote a *BRAND NEW* TCP stack for Vista+. This is why these old bugs keep popping up in the news. Yes, it was patched -- but that was when they were using the forked BSD stack. Now they get to play this game for the next 10 years until their new stack matures.

    2. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Informative

      You're forgetting about the part where Microsoft wrote a *BRAND NEW* TCP stack for Vista+. This is why these old bugs keep popping up in the news. Yes, it was patched -- but that was when they were using the forked BSD stack.

      You got marked troll, and it's deserved. But better that someone else explain - MS never used a BSD stack. They licensed the Spider Systems STREAMS stack which was a wholly separate implementation (for one, it was STREAMS which BSD, AFAIK has never implemented).

      However, my understanding is that MS did eventually roll their own stack, iirc it was for XP.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    3. Re:POD has long since been patched. by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2, Informative

      You got marked troll, and it's deserved. But better that someone else explain - MS never used a BSD stack. They licensed the Spider Systems STREAMS stack which was a wholly separate implementation (for one, it was STREAMS which BSD, AFAIK has never implemented).

      Those of us who are old enough remember the "portions copyright the regents of the University of California Berkeley" (or words to that effect) that used to be part of the Windows legal declarations from 95 onward. It has been considered common knowledge that their pre-Vista TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD, as was their FTP executable. If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please.

      However, my understanding is that MS did eventually roll their own stack, iirc it was for XP.

      Nope, the "from the ground up" rewrite was for Vista, although they had previously partially rewritten the stack for Win 2K and for XP I believe. And there were definitely a number of bugs in that new Vista stack - here's one example. But if you were paying attention back during the interminable Vista beta process, you would've remembered the noise about those old TCP/IP vulnerabilities, solved long ago, that Microsoft re-introduced with their new stack.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    4. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Ironhandx · · Score: 1

      You don't recall correctly. You were right about the first bit, he was right about the second.

      MS did not use the BSD stack, however their new TCP stack was invented for Vista.

      Its got a long ass way to go to mature. Its sad that they didn't revert that one change for Windows 7.

      From what I understand its supposed to allow more functionality eventually. I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.

    5. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 1

      It has been considered common knowledge that their pre-Vista TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD, as was their FTP executable. If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please.

      Like lots of common knowledge, it was https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357">wrong and you'll see that the wikipedia page you linked to does not cite its sources for those claims. While it may be true that Vista has a complete network stack rewrite, that does not mean there wasn't an earlier rewrite when Spider was dumped.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    6. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 1

      Stupid typo!

      https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    7. Re:POD has long since been patched. by ozmanjusri · · Score: 1

      I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there.

      Deep packet inspection and silent (hidden) report-to-base capabilities.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    8. Re:POD has long since been patched. by jamesh · · Score: 1

      From what I understand its supposed to allow more functionality eventually. I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.

      Have you ever used the IPv6 "bolted on top" of the XP/2003 TCP/IP stack? The Vista implementation is much better. Guess why.

    9. Re:POD has long since been patched. by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      Did you notice this line in the (corrected) article you linked to?

      "Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix."

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    10. Re:POD has long since been patched. by benjymouse · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Those of us who are old enough remember the "portions copyright the regents of the University of California Berkeley" (or words to that effect) that used to be part of the Windows legal declarations from 95 onward. It has been considered common knowledge that their pre-Vista TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD, as was their FTP executable

      The "common knowledge" here is an euphemism for myth. Back in Windows NT 3.1 (!) MS licensed a TCP/IP stack from Spider. That *may* have been based partially or entirely on the BSD stack of the time. However, as of Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 95 that stack had been replaced by Microsofts own stack. Some of the utilities (ftp client, ping?) were still the original BSD utilities, or based on them. The network stack has not been BSD since Windows NT 3.1.

      If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please.

      here you go: https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

      Nope, the "from the ground up" rewrite was for Vista, although they had previously partially rewritten the stack for Win 2K and for XP I believe.

      Incorrect, it had been previously rewritten for Windows NT 3.5. See above.

      But if you were paying attention back during the interminable Vista beta process, you would've remembered the noise about those old TCP/IP vulnerabilities, solved long ago, that Microsoft re-introduced with their new stack.

      Citation? or should I write

      If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please"

      --
      Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
    11. Re:POD has long since been patched. by benjymouse · · Score: 1

      I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.

      From Windows Internals, Fifth Edition (Mark E. Russinovich; David A. Solomon; Alex Ionescu):

      The Next Generation TCP/IP Stack offers several advanced features to improve network performance, some of which are outlined in the following list:

      • Receive Window Auto Tuning. The TCP protocol defines a receive window size, which determines how much data a receiver can accept before the server requests an acknowledgment. A higher size favors low-latency networks with high throughput, while lower values work better on networks such as Wi-Fi. The Windows TCP/IP stack is capable of analyzing the conditions of a network and choosing the optimal receive window size, adjusting it as needed if the network conditions change.
      • Compound TCP (CTCP). While automatically changing the receive window size allows more data to be received, CTCP aggressively increases the amount of data that can be sent by a machine, while monitoring bandwidth, latency, and packet loss. Using CTCP on a high-bandwidth, low-latency network can significantly improve transfer speeds. CTCP is disabled by default.
      • Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). Whenever a TCP packet is lost, the TCP protocol assumes that the data was dropped because of router congestion and enforces congestion control, dramatically lowering the sender's transmission rate. ECN allows routers to explicitly mark packets as being forwarded during congestion, which is read by the Windows TCP/IP stack as a sign that transmission rates should be lowered. Lowering rates in this manner results in better performance than relying on congestion control. ECN is disabled by default.
      • High-loss throughput improvements, including the NewReno Fast Recovery Algorithm, Enhanced Selective Acknowledgment (SACK), Forward RTO-Recovery (F-RTO), and Limited Transit. These algorithms reduce the overall retransmission of acknowledgments or TCP segments during high-loss scenarios while still maintaining the integrity of the TCP stream. This allows for greater bandwidth in these environments and preserves TCP's reliable transport semantics
      --
      Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
    12. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I am (or was, its been 15 years) actually pretty familiar with Spider's code and it wasn't even close to to the BSD stack.

      They probably lifted constants and structures inherent to TCP/IP and might have cut-n-pasted a few code snippets like checksum calculations, maybe even some higher-level stuff to emulate sockets on top of the STREAMS Transport Layer Interface. But the heart and soul of the BSD stack is the mbuf structure and that didn't exist at all anywhere in the Spider code. Not just a simple search-and-replace with a different data structure, it was an entirely different data flow because STREAMS had requirements that couldn't just be "bolted on" to the BSD stack.

      Totally sucked for me because everything I knew about BSD network internals was useless there - and everything I learned about Spider's code while on that job became practically useless the second I moved on as Sun's own STREAMS implementation in Solaris, which was basically the only mainstream use of STREAMS, had nothing to do with Spider.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    13. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 2

      FWIW all of those things are part of a good modern stack and technically not more functionality. I too struggled to figure out what might qualify as "more functionality," the only things I could think of would be support for new protocols or "replacement" implementations - like an app could pass a function pointer to the stack and say "for my connections, use this code to do the tcp processing instead of what came with the kernel" or possibly define an entirely new protocol that could be application defined but still run in the kernel context for efficiency.

      Of course the alternative is that "more functionality" isn't the right words to describe MS's intent and what they really said or meant was closer to "easier for MS's engineers to modify in the future."

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    14. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/network/bb545475

      This explains the new features. You will either instantly know that this requires a complete rewrite, or you do not really understand how a protocol stack is implemented.

    15. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Threni · · Score: 1

      No amount of fixing a post referring to a Kuro7hin page is going to remove the stupid.

    16. Re:POD has long since been patched. by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Nope, the "from the ground up" rewrite was for Vista, although they had previously partially rewritten the stack for Win 2K and for XP I believe. And there were definitely a number of bugs in that new Vista stack - here's one example.

      In fact, during the Vista betas, it was revealed that the "new" stack was indeed vulnerable to a whole laundry list of vulns fixed in the XP stack... Not only P-o-D, but also land.c and other antique exploits would work without modification when executed against Vista. This proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Microsoft was not doing any bounds checking in the TCP stack. IOW, they were making the same amateur-hour mistakes they made the FIRST time around all over again for their new version of Windows.

      On the plus side, I hear IPv6 actually works properly with the new stack, and it's quite a bit faster at the top end, but seriously, Microsoft is incompetent on their best day.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    17. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      When I was in college I once witnessed it put to good use. I was over in a friend's dorm room. It was 2 am and the asshole above him was playing Quake with the volume at 11. It was a well known secret at the time that the network admins kept a "hidden", but world-readable list on the unix server of every IP address in the school, including who it belonged to, what room, and what wall port. So my friend grepped the list for the room number above him, guessed which wall port, and then POD nuked the IP address associated with it. The sound instantly stopped.

      The guy tried launching it a couple more times, gave up after being "denied".

    18. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not just Linux. HPUX, AIX, NeXT, and Solaris were all vulnerable in my lab when this first surfaced in ~1995. Linux was patched in days. The others took quite a bit longer.

    19. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Just FYI, the POD doesn't affect any modern OSes.

      In my exclusively personal opinion, unrelated to any opther person or corporation, after years of working in IT...

      Modern OS probably have other issues, some of which will take years to solve, just like this one.

      That's why I say professional support really is no support, when you happen to need a specific feature. FLOSS OTOH allows one to (1) talk directly to the developer or (2) produce a patch to solve the problem (and optionally send to the maintainer) or (3) start a fork in the extreme case.

      That's support in my view. It follows closed software usually don't provide support, as I understand it (i.e. a solution to a specific problem at hand).

      Another way to put it is: "you get what you pay for" is a fallacy. Theory is beautiful but in practice you pay and don't get what you paid for, unless you sue (and then you pay to the lawyers, so you end up paying more to get the same thing you initially asked).

    20. Re:POD has long since been patched. by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      There were three stacks used in Windows.

      Windows 3.x didn't come with a stack, you had to supply your own (Trumpet Winsock, anyone?).

      Windows 95, though, featured it's own brand new stack, BSD based.

      Then WinSock 2 came out, and that one dumped the BSD based stack for their own. (WinSock 2 featured changable stacks with a new internal API which made it incompatible with the old stack). This stack was under development for a while - Windows 95 shipped with a BSD stack purely because of release date issues.

      Then Vista, or more correctly, NDIS6 rolled out. NDIS6's packet architecture is completely different, and to extract the speed improvements (as well as take advantage of TCP Offload Engines better), it was rewritten to use the new NDIS6 API set. (NDIS does, however, allow old NDIS 4/5.1 protocols and miniports work through a built-in translation layer).

    21. Re:POD has long since been patched. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      From TFA:
      Storms said it appeared that today's "Ping of Death" bug was a different vulnerability than Microsoft patched in its now-ancient OSes of the 1990s.

      "it appeared"?
      The bug affects the QoS service on Vista and newer OSes - a service which wasn't available in 1990 on windows.
      XP and machines without URL-based QoS enabled are unaffected.

      Also from TFAdvisory:
      By default, the URL-based Quality of Service feature is not enabled on any Windows operating system.

      In other words: no big deal.
      And it's a "ping of death" only in that the QoS service listens to ICMP packets.
      Misleading story is misleading.

  4. Didnt bluescreen by antifoidulus · · Score: 1

    The ping of death didnt cause your computer to blue screen, it caused it to become a picture frame. Everything, including the mouse pointer, would just stop.

    --
    Monstar L
    1. Re:Didnt bluescreen by sg_oneill · · Score: 1

      Depends which windows. At least one of the NTs definately would bluescreen.

      I actually had this on a function key on my mIRC client, so that if someone was trolling the IRC channel, I'd highlight their name, hit F10 (or something) and it'd kick them, ban them, then win-nuke them. More malicious types would just drop a bot into a channel and nuke everyone in there. God damn the dial-up days where wild sometimes.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    2. Re:Didnt bluescreen by antifoidulus · · Score: 1

      Ah, by the time I started using NT the ping had already been fixed, Windows 95(98?) would picture frame though.

      --
      Monstar L
    3. Re:Didnt bluescreen by devphaeton · · Score: 3, Interesting

      God damn the dial-up days where wild sometimes.

      Fugganaye right. I shouldn't admit any of this, but I was into scrolling chat rooms* back in the mid-late 90s and it was the fucking Wild West. Winnukes and Portfloods for days and days. Javascript exploits and whatnot. People getting pWn3d for no good reason. You had to be patched and armed just to stay in the joint.

      There was a guy that flexed his hax0r muscle at everyone, but especially gave me shit. Seriously unprovoked bullshit, following me from room to room, then later site to site. I could write a book on this, but basically through some elaborate social engineering of several people (including his school) I was able to determine his home address. I bribed a high school friend of mine who was going to a school in the next city over to go take a picture "of the white house at this address" and send it to me. Some low-tech scanning practices and some floppy disk work at a local Staples ensued.

      The next time he fucked with me I posted the pic of his house in the chat room. I wish I had logged his responses, and the crying he did to my alt (the social engineering 'chick') over the next few days. He never messed with me or anyone else in the place again. It was a pretty good hack, and I dreamed guys like Kevin Poulsen would approve. But I actually felt pretty dirty afterwards.

      *hotelchat ftw!

      --


      do() || do_not(); // try();
    4. Re:Didnt bluescreen by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 1

      It took me an entire week of being 'nuked' several times a day to figure out Win95 was being less stable than usual.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

    5. Re:Didnt bluescreen by Isaac-1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, the wild west days, I remember hanging around on IRC on #userfriendly where much of the crowd were of the IT types working in the .com boom which was very wild west itself. One night one of the regulars posted a message that she was on dial up and was being ping flooded by some guy with a cable modem, and asked someone ping flood the guy off the net so she could upload an important file before it was due in a few minutes. Well the moments afterward were one of those things where you look back and think, hey maybe too many people decided to unleash too much fire power at once. Sure there were those that were sitting on T1, T3, etc. lines at the time that reacted to the call within seconds, but there were also a few BIG GUNS aimed at this lowly cable modem user's IP within seconds. Think core routers from big name national ISP's, and .COM giants. When the smoke cleared a minute or two later everyone realized not only was the cable modem user in question off the net, but so was his cable provider.

    6. Re:Didnt bluescreen by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      I was there for that, "borrowing" my school's connection.

      And yes, I used this nick in the channel.

    7. Re:Didnt bluescreen by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      The thing is, most of those knew NOTHING about TCP/IP, so my standard reply when people asked for my IP addy was to reply with 127.0.0.1 (and yes, that worked for PoD vs Windows...)

      In school, we used it to knock the Quake players offline, so people could do their homework etc on the school computers.

    8. Re:Didnt bluescreen by dzfoo · · Score: 1

      I had Win95 at the time, and it did bluescreen.

      Ah, the memories. I remember being naive, and searching frantically around the intertubes looking for a "how to" document explaining how to employ the "Ping Of Death" that I just recently read about.

      My search took me to IRC, where--true to n00b form--I proceeded to ask a very dumb question:


      DZ> Can someone show me how to do the ping of death?
      Someone> Like this...

      [blue screen]

      My girlfriend was right next to me and thought it was the funniest thing. I did so too. Eventually I played the same trick on other unsuspecting kiddies.

      Funny.

                -dZ.

      --
      Carol vs. Ghost
      ...Can you save Christmas?
    9. Re:Didnt bluescreen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Not only can you not ignore the collateral damage, people should also have asked themselves if the alleged flooder had actually done anything at all. People regularly ask for help with retaliating when they're actually just looking for someone else to carry out their (first-strike) attack for them. Attacks under the guise of "active defense" are a very old tactic - Poland certainly won't forget.

    10. Re:Didnt bluescreen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hah i remember back in 98 or so irc.scifi.com we would manually ping flood operators out of a channel... fortunately didn't have reconnect scripts and the servers didn't have much in the way of services... we would wait til there were just 3 or 4 of them... manually flood each of them off the server using like 5 or 6 people doing it, until they were all out of the channel, then all but one would /part the other would bounce back in real quick to take over the channel... fun times.

    11. Re:Didnt bluescreen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was the wild wild west then! amen to that! One of the reasons why the net has become so boring for me now :(. It was fun to code and to follow security mailing list then!

      +selven

    12. Re:Didnt bluescreen by SierraQ · · Score: 1

      I have my own story to add to the Wild West. Back then I worked on managing windows based kiosks on a campus that provided information to visitors and also ran elections for the university student government. Elections were always a pain and every kiosk needed to be up and stable for days to take the votes.

      Well, some jokers tucked away behind some terminal deep in one of the buildings decided to have some fun and sent repeated PODs to each kiosk (which did cause a blue-screen, BTW) on election day. I spent the entire day going from one kiosk to another resetting them, thinking they were just overloaded (the software has memory leaks). It was only after I had reset one and it blue-screened right in front of my face a moment later than I realized what was happening. I was already on no sleep dealing with this, and quite angry. I was ready to find whomever was responsible and beat them within an inch of their life.

      While perhaps justified, vigilantism tends to be frowned upon. So instead I went to our network guy who was an old salt who knew all the tricks and had some tools. Using the campus routers, he put trace monitors on some of my kiosks--all from the comfort of his office which was pretty neat at the time--and as soon as the next kiosk was attacked I told him and he found the offending packet AND what building it came from. An hour later we had narrowed it to the specific terminal. I was told later that the students responsible were quite shocked when officials walked in caught them. I never knew their fate but the rest of the week went smoothly and the systems were never attacked again. (Of course I patched them soon after.)

    13. Re:Didnt bluescreen by Capt.DrumkenBum · · Score: 1

      I remember those days. I was running Linux, and hanging out in a few IRC channels. There was one evening where everyone except me and one other person kept dropping out, that then reappearing 5 to 10 minutes later. I finally figured out what was going on when he got pissed off and said in public $USERNAME why won't you die!!!
      His ISP used static hostnames, so I knocked together a script that scanned for him to be on line and ping flooded him. I had cable internet, (Early adopter) so if was easy to just flood him off the net.
      After a week or so I stopped. I didn't want his ISP to figure it out, and tell my ISP what I had been doing.

      --
      If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
  5. Re:IRC by TWX · · Score: 2

    Fuck that I did it to people who were beating me in QWCTF.

    When I used to host LAN parties after the DoS attacks became well publicized, we'd all start out playing the game nicely, be it Warcraft II or Quake or whatnot, but when someone would feel they were wronged (how one would be wronged in a game with fairly inflexible rules I still don't understand) or were doing far worse than everyone else, they'd quit and start attacking whoever they felt deserved it.

    I started running Warcraft II under MS-DOS only, using DOS networking with only IPX, so that I couldn't be knocked out, but friends who chose to run it under Windows disappeared from the game frequently.

    As for Quake, if I didn't set up a dedicated server on the Linux box then I'd host it, so they'd usually leave me alone. I guess my friends were altruistic enough to not try to take the whole game down, just the player they took exception to...

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  6. ping of what? by nucklebone · · Score: 0

    yawn...what? windows? ping of what?

    --
    - Nucklebone
  7. Re:IRC by bhcompy · · Score: 1

    You could run WC2 with IPX under Windows as well.. shouldn't be affected by the issue

  8. Patch = turn off ping support? by Karljohan · · Score: 0

    Why, then, are Windows machines never responding to ping calls? This has been the case at least on all networks I've been on. Did the patch of Windows simply turn off the ping server service?

    1. Re:Patch = turn off ping support? by eht · · Score: 3, Informative

      Since Windows XP SP2 I think it was the firewall is turned on by default(or at least really really encourages you to do so) and blocks ping responses and was released August 25, 2004.

  9. More Information Please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I thought the POD worked because once the packets were reassembled they ended up larger than the buffer that was created to hold them.

    This needs much more information than subby turning a 3 page article into one paragraph with errors.

  10. Misleading title by FrootLoops · · Score: 1
    To be clear, this bug hasn't been in Windows since the 1990's (which is how I read the title). From TFA:

    The bug exists in Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, Microsoft said, but not in Windows XP or Server 2003.

    1. Re:Misleading title by Psychotria · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It would make more sense if you provided context for your quote

      Storms said it appeared that today's "Ping of Death" bug was a different vulnerability than Microsoft patched in its now-ancient OSes of the 1990s.

      The bug exists in Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, Microsoft said, but not in Windows XP or Server 2003.

    2. Re:Misleading title by AmberBlackCat · · Score: 1

      I think Microsoft would do the United States a big service to remove ping from consumer versions of Windows altogether. People may want to ping another server to test their connection speed but no home user needs their own computer to respond to a ping.

    3. Re:Misleading title by guruevi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That is stupid. Any IP host should respond to a ping. It's one way of testing if everything is working. Disabling ping just because your IP stack is buggy is security through obscurity. ICMP has to be implemented according to standard.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    4. Re:Misleading title by FrootLoops · · Score: 1

      I don't know what "different vulnerability" means, so I'm not sure what that extra sentence adds. I have two interpretations: (1) a bug was introduced, patched, and all relevant code was rewritten in Vista, introducing the original error again; (2) two rather similar but somehow fundamentally different bugs were introduced, one in the 90's and one in the Vista rewrite. That's guesswork, though, and as far as I recall not backed up by the article.

    5. Re:Misleading title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You have obviously never worked with technical support for an ISP. Oh how I hate that almost no Windows-machines respond to ping, because all firewalls, including the one built into Windows disables ICMP by default. I love Mac:s and (the occasional) Linux machine you run into, because they do respond, making troubleshooting a whole lot easier.

      I think that every machine should respond to ping, it's just silly not to.

    6. Re:Misleading title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Complete Crap.
      The mentioned CVE is not listed in Mitre's database as a vulnerability yet and it is not mentioned in the linked security bulletin. Furthermore, the security bulletin updates Internet Explorer and is not a core flaw in the OS networking stack like ping of death.

    7. Re:Misleading title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funny, After the patch, I tested it. XP SP2, XP SP3 both halt. ( Neither did a blue screen, but the mouse stopped working. ).

      XP is now 10 years old, and my security setup is almost bullet proof,
      having been attacked by almost everything. I can get rid of any trojan/virus

      Although some of the early PODs were fixed, this one had been around since then,
      but there are still others, because of the *sh&tty* MS TCP/IP stack.
      ( Two in particular as I said, halt the OS. )

      "The bug exists in Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, Microsoft said, but not in Windows XP or Server 2003."
      Bull sh&t. All the products that use The updated stack, including XP and windows 2000 are still vulnerable, and XP/2000 are still vulnerable to the bug. I bet a 10 year old could verify this.

    8. Re:Misleading title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ICMP is implemented, it's used as a sideband channel to control IP traffic. This does not obligate anyone to honor every single kind of ICMP message from random hosts outside their immediate network.

    9. Re:Misleading title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I think Microsoft would do the United States a big service to remove ping from consumer versions of Windows altogether."

      I think Microsoft would do the United States a big service to remove consumer versions of Windows altogether.

      FTFY.

    10. Re:Misleading title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am stupid. My mother should respond to a ping. It's one way of getting a sandwich delivered to me in the basement. Disabling ping just because your IP stack is buggy is my pet peeve because nothing else in the world matters to me. ICMP has to be implemented or else I will wet my pants.

      Fixed that for you.

    11. Re:Misleading title by AmberBlackCat · · Score: 1

      Would it kill you to have the Windows machine initiate the ping to a server instead of replying to it? Would it kill you to just transfer a file from one machine to another if you want to see if everything is working?

      Making a Windows machine ignore ping requests will not make it impossible to test a network connection, Mr. "+5 Insightful for calling somebody stupid". What it will do is make it slightly harder for unwanted attackers to know there is a computer there. Security through obscurity might not be total security but it's better than just saying "yes, I'm here".

    12. Re:Misleading title by AmberBlackCat · · Score: 1

      If you are working for an ISP in the United States then you don't need to ping anyway because all you're going to do is end up blaming the problem on the router, regardless of what the problem is.

    13. Re:Misleading title by guruevi · · Score: 1

      You're missing the point. ICMP has to be implemented in order for your IP stack to work. Whether you drop, reject or accept certain ICMP packets is irrelevant, if your IP connection wants to work, it has to process them. If there is a bug in how you process ICMP packets it won't matter whether or not you reply to them or not.

      And most recent tools don't rely on ping anymore as Windows Firewall does drop all ICMP packets. Even nmap has had the option of testing a host without ping for as far as I can remember.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  11. Re:IRC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WTF are you talking about?

    The first people on IRC are the same still using it. And they've always been on *IX, not Linux, *IX.

    The stupid Windows kiddies were just a fad. You must be one of them, discovering IRC when it was already declining and switching to Lignux since that's become the latest fad then.

  12. Re:IRC by devphaeton · · Score: 2

    There are actually a lot of "Windows Kiddies" on IRC. Not a majority by far, but still some. I was surprised that a libSDL channel I recently got into was almost all Windows folks.

    By my estimation, in my experience (freenode and efnet), most people on IRC are running some form of older-school Linux distribution, such as Debian or Slackware. There are some Ubuntu peeps but I think a lot of them use something more 'modern', i.e. skype or pidgin. I see BSD folks in my BSD channels, but they only barely edge out the Windows guys overall.

    Now that USENET has gone down the shitter, I still enjoy IRC, and will continue to do so until it goes away.

    --


    do() || do_not(); // try();
  13. Too bad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    those of us stuck with Windows XP Pro SP1 (due to software/hardware issues) can't run this patch. Well, is there a workaround? To force it to patch without getting SP3 as it says it requires?

    Seriously. I've tried upgrading to SP2 twice and it created nothing but problems. Very slow and some software broke. Plus on my other machines I found out SP2 changes IE6.

    1. Re:Too bad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hmm, maybe you should join the 21st century and upgrade to Fedora 15...

    2. Re:Too bad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think I'm going to get any helpful replies. It seems too many posters/moderators on Slashdot are too anti-XP or anti-Windows.

      Seriously. How is my asking a question for help justification for being moderated down? I thought people would care about security regardless of which operating system of choice someone has.

  14. None of these script kiddies are going o get my IP by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 2

    at 127.0.0.1 they'll find out it's armored beyond anything they can come up with

  15. Re:None of these script kiddies are going o get my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He's pulling your leg, script kiddies. You're not going to let him get away with it, are you? His real IP address is 127.37.164.116. Now, go get him.

  16. Re:IRC by mikael_j · · Score: 1

    [...] (how one would be wronged in a game with fairly inflexible rules I still don't understand) [...]

    Well, there are a lot of games out there that have various flaws that can be exploited to your advantage which is generally considered to be something you don't do outside of a strictly competitive environment. Then there are "house rules" (one I remember fondly was playing various RTS games 2v2 on maps that had one or more rivers crossing the map with a stated rule that no one was allowed to cross the river within the first n minutes of the game, really cut down on the number of games that just turned into tank/zerg rush wins in a few minutes) that aren't coded into the game but which are agreed upon by the participants (and there's always that one ass who sends half a dozen tanks and a couple of APCs loaded with engineers across the river a little early).

    --
    Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
  17. Patents by SnarfQuest · · Score: 1

    At first, I read that as Microsoft patents "Ping of Death". And it didn't surprise me.

    --
    Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
  18. Re:None of these script kiddies are going o get my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    at 127.0.0.1 they'll find out it's armored beyond anything they can come up with

    Dude I got in easily and you have so much warez and porn on your computer, some pretty sick stuff too

  19. Re:None of these script kiddies are going o get my by laejoh · · Score: 1

    It works even better if you provide 127.1.37.8 as your ip address! Some people start to recognize 127.0.0.1 :)

  20. Sir Greybeard, I am humbled before your greatness! by rts008 · · Score: 1

    Had I only known......;-)
    The pure, unadulterated anarchy, and beautiful chaos of this mentality(in regards to the AT commands) is absolutely stunning and awesome.
    Really. (no sarcasm intended)

    *apply sarcasm/maybe offtopic, also
    Thanks to you, I now have the proper incentive to continue research and development on on my iTIME Traveler® software for your iPhone! (soon coming to an APP Store near you!)
    Depending on various IP lawsuits, my be also soon ported to Android and Win 7 mobile, or none of the above, including IOSx... YMMV.

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  21. Holy Nuke It From Orbit, Batman! by rts008 · · Score: 1

    Wow!
    What a revelation for me.
    I say this as a former n00b-troll.

    I will say that this 'lesson gave to me' in my ms- spent[sic] [1]youth had a profound positive influence on my internet behavior, except when i 'drink while posting' here on /., sad to say.
    Again, wow.
    Thanks very much, BTW, really.

    [1] Some habits are hard to break. ;-)
    As my wife has said about me many times, "At least he's house-broke, but he's not domesticated. But, I've never shopped at 'Normal-Boys-R-Us'. Ever!"

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  22. I remember the Blue Screen of Death by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why are they not patching that?

    Why???

  23. Re:None of these script kiddies are going o get my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What a coincidence. That's the same combination as my VPN.

  24. Re:IRC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now that USENET has gone down the shitter, I still enjoy IRC, and will continue to do so until it goes away.

    I know what you mean, but these days #!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!freeporn is nothing but trolls and spammers.

  25. EnableICMPRedirect in TCP Parameters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

    EnableICMPRedirect = 1

    * This stops PING responses IF set to = 1 (0 of course, re-enables it)... I've been using this as a defense vs. ICMP "Ping-Of-Death" attacks since, oh, around 1996-1997, or thereabouts, iirc...

    APK

    P.S.=> Take a read here for more detailed information, "straight-from-the-horses'-mouth" @ Microsoft:

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc739622(WS.10).aspx

    and, of course, a verification for you that PING does indeed rely on ICMP, here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping

    ... apk

  26. Memories by g0bshiTe · · Score: 1

    I miss the olden times. I can't remember how many times I sent that to friends to fuck with them.

    --
    I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
  27. Ping of Death == WinNuke? by tekrat · · Score: 1

    There used to be a Macintosh Application called WIN-NUKE, and we'd use it to crash NT-based web-servers. I think this was during the days of NT3.5, and Macs were still running System 7.1 or something like that.

    Anyhow, we were a Mac/Linux shop at the time, and during the dot-com boom, there was this dopey company called "muffinhead", we thought that was a dumb name, so we'd win-nuke them constantly.

    We'd ping them from the linux box, see a continuous stream of replies, run win-nuke, and then... the pings would stop, and we'd know they were down.

    Back in the early days of the web, you could easily take down half your competition in New York if you were interested enough in doing that. Generally though, my company had enough work that we weren't all that interested - that is, until the boom went bust, and then we were hunting for scraps of work like everyone else.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
    1. Re:Ping of Death == WinNuke? by Kenshin · · Score: 1

      I wonder if this is the same exploit used by the old Windows app "BitchSlap".

      I remember entering the IP address of someone who annoyed me into it, then seeing them disappear from IRC.

      Good times.

      --

      Does it make you happy you're so strange?

  28. Re:IRC by Bert64 · · Score: 1

    I used to run Quake and Doom on Linux for the same reason...

    --
    http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  29. Woohoo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I ran the Ping Of Death page when this was discovered. Ironically, Windows 95 (for that's what it was, back in the day) was immune, but it could send the invalid packets which could take out all sorts: Linux boxes, routers, printers, plus a few mainframes and mid-range systems as well.

    During testing we rebooted my linux box in London with a single packet sent from California. In fact the results were so obviously severe that vendors were putting out patches like crazy, and the whole thing blew over in about 2 weeks. Try getting that sort of turnaround these days.

      -- Mike

  30. WINDOWS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "a way to show the instability of the (Windows) operating system."

    Except that the following systems were at one point also vulnerable:

    Solaris x86
    Linux = 2.0.23
    OpenVMS
    DEC Unix
    HP-UX
    Novell Netware
    AIX
    MacOS
    and more.

    http://insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html

  31. IMCP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    zoiks, I'm under an IMCP attack (see video)

  32. Re:None of these script kiddies are going o get my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A while ago this joke would not work on Slashdot.
    But now Maybe some will fall for it.

  33. Re:None of these script kiddies are going o get my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See, that's another reason IPv6 is a departure from the good old days. It's a bit easier to figure out that "::1" is your own computer.

  34. Re:None of these script kiddies are going o get my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I prefer 127.31.2.119
    It blends in better.

  35. Re:Ping of Win by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    September never ended. Hasn't since 1993. Damn you, AOL.

  36. Re:IRC by mysidia · · Score: 1

    By my estimation, in my experience (freenode and efnet), most people on IRC are running some form of older-school Linux distribution, such as Debian or Slackware. There are some Ubuntu peeps but I think a lot of them use something more 'modern', i.e. skype or pidgin. I see BSD folks in my BSD channels, but they only barely edge out the Windows guys overall.

    I'll go with that. I'm one of the few folks left who still uses IRC, and I used Slackware until very recently... I am afraid I have moved to the dark side; using MacOS on the desktop. I think if there are hackers on IRC who still use windows, most of them are at least smart enough to use an *ix-based proxy, such as BNC.

    As a long time DALnet user; I can't say too much about Freenode/Efnet. But I have not observed many Windows "hackers" anymore. Sure, there are still windows users. Not the types who would engage in PoD competitions.

    I use the hyperbole as one of the "5 users left" on IRC, because since I started using IRC on DALnet in early 1995; I have watched the average peak online number of users counts grow well into 130,000+ users, and then in later years drop way back to 15,000. I can't help but mourn that IRC in many respects may be past its prime; i'm afraid networks will slowly erode , as soon as the current generation of IRC server admins retire, and ISPs can no longer be found that want to run IRC servers for free. :-/

  37. Re:IRC by devphaeton · · Score: 1

    I use the hyperbole as one of the "5 users left" on IRC, because since I started using IRC on DALnet in early 1995; I have watched the average peak online number of users counts grow well into 130,000+ users, and then in later years drop way back to 15,000.
    I can't help but mourn that IRC in many respects may be past its prime; i'm afraid networks will slowly erode , as soon as the current generation of IRC server admins retire, and ISPs can no longer be found that want to run IRC servers for free. :-/

    It's been a few days, but I hope you've come back to read this...

    I've used the same "last 5 people on IRC" joke myself. IRC still exists, but I think you're right in that it's slowly dying. I first connected BitchX to efnet in 1998 (on my Caldera OpenLinux system!), and it was an insane, vibrant, dangerous and beautiful experience. I later moved over to freenode but there was still a very active community. I took a break, and have come back to it recently, and all the old channels are 'dead'. Even the channels that have 150+ users in them, they're all lurkers, and all of them are lurking in 49 other channels as well. I used to log 200K of real dialogue in logs on a daily basis, but nowadays you'll get about 20K of system messages and nobody saying anything.

    It's sad. I really miss being able to connect with intelligent, like-minded people on such a deep and nerdy level. The infrastructure is still there, but there's no content or people left.

    --


    do() || do_not(); // try();