And a final followup, just for the record. The timed out (408 error) connections I was seeing was due to my ISP filtering out the payload of the work, but its impossible to ignore the initial connection, so it ends up leaving open connections for all the worm connection attempts.
Lowering my Apache timeout to 60 seconds brought the connection level back down to a managable level.
It really is sad how uninformed our elected officals can be when it comes to technology (or any kind of tool for that matter, just look at how well all the gun laws have worked to prevent criminals from using them).
They don't understand that restrictions will only effect commerce and privacy. They will weaken my link to my bank, broker, partners in business, etc. It is obvious to any thinking person that restrictions on encryption will only be obeyed by law-abiding people not by criminals, who by definition do not obey the law!
It will also create a new class of criminal, along the lines of what the DCMA has done to programmers. I will be a criminal if they pass some of these laws -- not because I have commited a criminal act or plotted a crime, but because I use a piece of software that doesn't conform to Government imposed insanity.
Is this what a free country is about? No. Liberty and Freedom come first, not security or a police state. The burden is upon the government and law enforcement to work within the frame work of Liberty to do the best job they can, not to restrict our Freedom and Liberty to make their job easier.
I will NOT give up Liberty for Security. Life is not safe, and freedom has its price as well as its rewards. I am willing to accept that price. Are you?
Just an update/clarification - I'm now not seeing the same response for all attacking IPs (now that I've looked at more than 1). I'm not seeing any code-red like attacks because my ISP filters those at the router.
I'm seeing massive numbers of timed out requests on my sytems this morning. It started at exactly 9:06 eastern time.
I checked one of the IPs and it said 'Fuck USA Government, Fuck PoisonBOx' and opened a second window with what looked like a MIME buffer overflow attempt. I run Opera on Linux so it didn't effect me. It looks like we may be getting hit in a shotgun approach. My systems are in the 207.227 range and 208.
That the terrorists use sophisticated encryption measures and that our intelligence agencies are under-funded and don't have the ability to keep tabs on the terrorists
This isn't nesicarily true, cell based organizations, if they are smart, will avoid anything but direct communications.
To answer your other question. No. I will not give up any of my liberties. The world is an unsafe place, we must accept the risks that come with being a free nation. If we do not then the experiment is over. Jerry Pournelle thinks that this is the end of the Republic and the move to an Empire. See www.jerrypournelle.com for more of his thoughts. See www.libertynews.org for discussions and news.
If people want an alternative site to post at feel free to hop over to www.libertynews.org. I've got lots of BW to spare, especially today.
Please try to limit it to factual updates from around the country, limit the rampant speculation for now please.
You should check out the IF community. Take a look at the links from www.guetech.org links page. Also check out the rec.games.int-fiction and rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroups. There is an archive of IF games and authoring systems at my mirror site at ftp.guetech.org/if-archive that includes games, interpreters (needed to play the games) and authoring systems to write games.
If you could get them involved in this it would be a big benefit to them! You have to read and think logically (in some games illogically) in order to solve the games, and you can even write your own and learn how to program at the same time (TADS and Inform are the most popular authoring systems).
There is a wide selection of free games to play, including the Infocom games available from Activision.
I'll admit, the first Hacks of the Smartcards were real Hacks, but once that turns into a cookie-cutter business to rip off a company (no matter how big or evil you want to paint the corporation to be you little socialists) it ain't a Hack no more.
But the way DirecTV shut down the pirates was pure Hacking Poetry. Making them have to update with the trojan that was going to kill them in the end was brilliant! It reads like something from a William Gibson novel.
Slashdot should be ashamed for misusing Hacker in yet another story. These guys were Pirates, there was no technical skill involved in 99% of their activities -- it doesn't take much to follow someone elses directions.
Overall the article is accurate, but I get a bit fried at the continued bashing of so called censorship in the US. In other countries, yes, the government is censoring all of its citizens network access (China is a prime example).
But what do we have to complain about in the US? A cybercrime treaty that the outgoing President signed. Well everyone ought to know that the treaty has to be ratified by congress before it is binding in the US. Odds of that happening are low, and if you call or
email your congresscritters and let them know what you think it will be even lower.
Complaints about eBay. Well, they've been censoring things for a long time now. Try selling a gun on eBay (which you could do when they first opened). Not any longer. As a matter of fact, you cannot even sell a legal high capacity magazine on eBay these days! What's the answer? Other auction sites! Places like gunbroker.com have moved in to take over the segment of the market that eBay refuses to satisfy. That's freedom at work.
And the other thing that really frosts me is this insistence that requiring filtering on school and library computers (owned and paid for by all of us tax payers) is some kind of evil censorship. It isn't. If you want to browse your porn sites then get your own damn internet connection, don't do it on my dime. But they censor more than just port sites, you say. Well the answer to that is to lobby to get them to change (and reveal) the lists of the sites they block, not to remove the blocking completely.
And what reasonable parent would want to send their kid to the library to check out the latest Harry Potter book, only to have to walk by some pervert drooling over the latest Porn Pics.
Liberty and Freedom doesn't mean that you have the right to force the rest of us to pay for your habits. Keep it in your home, where it belongs. And don't forget -- when you accept Taxpayer Funds you have to also accept the strings that are attached.
Slashdot Mirror
And a final followup, just for the record. The timed out (408 error) connections I was seeing was due to my ISP filtering out the payload of the work, but its impossible to ignore the initial connection, so it ends up leaving open connections for all the worm connection attempts.
Lowering my Apache timeout to 60 seconds brought the connection level back down to a managable level.
So are these things overstocked/extra palm devices with a new case and software? For the price, I'd bet that's what they are.
Has anyone actually touched one of these things? How similar is it to a Palm III?
Just take a look at the number of attacks on port 111 trying to exploit unpatched RH 6.1 systems. We're not immune either!
According to the guys at the Honeynet project the average lifespan of an unpatched RH 6.1 box is 3 hours.
It really is sad how uninformed our elected officals can be when it comes to technology (or any kind of tool for that matter, just look at how well all the gun laws have worked to prevent criminals from using them).
They don't understand that restrictions will only effect commerce and privacy. They will weaken my link to my bank, broker, partners in business, etc. It is obvious to any thinking person that restrictions on encryption will only be obeyed by law-abiding people not by criminals, who by definition do not obey the law!
It will also create a new class of criminal, along the lines of what the DCMA has done to programmers. I will be a criminal if they pass some of these laws -- not because I have commited a criminal act or plotted a crime, but because I use a piece of software that doesn't conform to Government imposed insanity.
Is this what a free country is about? No. Liberty and Freedom come first, not security or a police state. The burden is upon the government and law enforcement to work within the frame work of Liberty to do the best job they can, not to restrict our Freedom and Liberty to make their job easier.
I will NOT give up Liberty for Security. Life is not safe, and freedom has its price as well as its rewards. I am willing to accept that price. Are you?
Just an update/clarification - I'm now not seeing the same response for all attacking IPs (now that I've looked at more than 1). I'm not seeing any code-red like attacks because my ISP filters those at the router.
Brian
I'm seeing massive numbers of timed out requests on my sytems this morning. It started at exactly 9:06 eastern time.
I checked one of the IPs and it said 'Fuck USA Government, Fuck PoisonBOx' and opened a second window with what looked like a MIME buffer overflow attempt. I run Opera on Linux so it didn't effect me. It looks like we may be getting hit in a shotgun approach. My systems are in the 207.227 range and 208.
Brian
That the terrorists use sophisticated encryption measures and that our intelligence agencies are under-funded and don't have the ability to keep tabs on the terrorists
This isn't nesicarily true, cell based organizations, if they are smart, will avoid anything but direct communications.
To answer your other question. No. I will not give up any of my liberties. The world is an unsafe place, we must accept the risks that come with being a free nation. If we do not then the experiment is over. Jerry Pournelle thinks that this is the end of the Republic and the move to an Empire. See www.jerrypournelle.com for more of his thoughts. See www.libertynews.org for discussions and news.
My "lame little website" www.libertynews.org is up and running and available for news updates. Facts only please!
Brian
If people want an alternative site to post at feel free to hop over to www.libertynews.org. I've got lots of BW to spare, especially today. Please try to limit it to factual updates from around the country, limit the rampant speculation for now please.
Brian
You should check out the IF community. Take a look at the links from www.guetech.org links page. Also check out the rec.games.int-fiction and rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroups. There is an archive of IF games and authoring systems at my mirror site at ftp.guetech.org/if-archive that includes games, interpreters (needed to play the games) and authoring systems to write games.
If you could get them involved in this it would be a big benefit to them! You have to read and think logically (in some games illogically) in order to solve the games, and you can even write your own and learn how to program at the same time (TADS and Inform are the most popular authoring systems). There is a wide selection of free games to play, including the Infocom games available from Activision.
Brian
But the way DirecTV shut down the pirates was pure Hacking Poetry. Making them have to update with the trojan that was going to kill them in the end was brilliant! It reads like something from a William Gibson novel.
Slashdot should be ashamed for misusing Hacker in yet another story. These guys were Pirates, there was no technical skill involved in 99% of their activities -- it doesn't take much to follow someone elses directions.
Brian
But what do we have to complain about in the US? A cybercrime treaty that the outgoing President signed. Well everyone ought to know that the treaty has to be ratified by congress before it is binding in the US. Odds of that happening are low, and if you call or email your congresscritters and let them know what you think it will be even lower.
Complaints about eBay. Well, they've been censoring things for a long time now. Try selling a gun on eBay (which you could do when they first opened). Not any longer. As a matter of fact, you cannot even sell a legal high capacity magazine on eBay these days! What's the answer? Other auction sites! Places like gunbroker.com have moved in to take over the segment of the market that eBay refuses to satisfy. That's freedom at work.
And the other thing that really frosts me is this insistence that requiring filtering on school and library computers (owned and paid for by all of us tax payers) is some kind of evil censorship. It isn't. If you want to browse your porn sites then get your own damn internet connection, don't do it on my dime. But they censor more than just port sites, you say. Well the answer to that is to lobby to get them to change (and reveal) the lists of the sites they block, not to remove the blocking completely.
And what reasonable parent would want to send their kid to the library to check out the latest Harry Potter book, only to have to walk by some pervert drooling over the latest Porn Pics.
Liberty and Freedom doesn't mean that you have the right to force the rest of us to pay for your habits. Keep it in your home, where it belongs. And don't forget -- when you accept Taxpayer Funds you have to also accept the strings that are attached.
For more of my rants and views drop on over to www.libertynews.org