Sure you don't have to guess -- you can just make stuff up! Team Polizei crapped on my lawn! Alex Roy hates white people! I have a hotel on the moon!
Team Polizei were not involved in that accident. There was no second Team Polizei car. They may be guilty of untold numbers of moving violations, but that one was not one of theirs. Please keep your team members of the idiots straight.
A better answer is having an ssh identity key set up with no passphrase. When it comes to automated tasks, especially for privileged accounts, one can use the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (or ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 for ssh2) to lock down what hosts can or cannot use the key, what commands can be run, and enable or disable other ssh features as needed. That way, a passphrase-less key for running file transfers doesn't have to lead to an interactive shell.
If I have to, say, automate an rsync of something from a remote box, I set up a new identity key just for that task, and use the -i flag in the local ssh command to specify use of that key. The remote box's authorized_keys file is setup to only allow my one local box to use that key, to only run that one rsync command, with only the arguments specified, and disables pty allocation, port forwarding, X11 forwarding, and agent forwarding. The authorized_keys entry looks like this (all on one line):
from="my.workstation.bar",command="/usr/bin/rsyn c --server -vlogDtprx ./var/backups",no-pty,no-port-forwarding,no-X11-f orwarding,no-agent-forwarding 1024 35 1234567890[...the actual key...] backups to home
man sshd and check out the authorized_keys section.
My company has been getting a bunch of 2-U SPARC clones from Craig-Warner, each of which has 2 PCI slots that are made usable by 90-degree L-shaped adapters. They're a pain in the ass to actually get PCI cards into, but they work; we stick a SCSI card and 4-port NIC into them. You might give those guys a call if you need help tracking some down. --
But, but, (not to suggest that you personally agree with this), what is the rule that says a mailhost should only accept email from other hosts that have MX records? MX records are for determining the destination of mail, and have nothing to do with its origin. Sites of any size frequently use different machines for end-user outgoing SMTP relay, rather than their main incoming MX hosts, in order to shed unnecessary load. --
So what's the problem with the bookshelf-style storage? I've got around 500 CD's, and they go really well on a set of shelves I built out of pine. They're similar to what radio stations use - each shelf is just high enough to accomodate a jewel box, and has a stop-rail along the back so all the fronts line up and don't slide all the way back. Pine's really cheap, and the construction couldn't be simpler. Scalability? Either add more shelves, or spend another $20/2hrs building another set.
I'd give more info, but I was just re-alphabetizing my collection, and now I have to start all over again... fsck... --
(if the username at the new ISP was taken, we had to call the customer and have them choose a knew one. Nobody was very happy about that).
Yikes, I don't suppose they would be.. We rarely had cases where that was necessary. We made hacks for both the UNIX servers and the billing database to avoid ever having to do that for more than a few select cases. This involved clusters of Navis Radius servers using realm and DNIS info to associate a user with a particular ISP, and auth off that ISP's shadow/users file, and tacking a dot and 3-character extension to the usernames when merging them into the main billing database. For email, we just left each original mailserver running, but were working on a modified q-popper that tied into the Radius system to work similarly to the dial-up authentication, and we would have been able to merge whole mailservers into the system.
Man, having to contact all of the static-IP users was bad enough, I feel for you having to call anybody whose username collided! --
So, they borrowed a bunch of money, set up a 6,000-sq.ft. co-lo datacenter, built their own fault-tolerant, fiber-optic backbone, and ended up with only 15,000 customers? (Where did that figure from above come from anyway? I couldn't find it on the link given.) That's awfully low.
You could easily put 15,000 users on a few Ultra-II's, a couple of DS-3's, and maybe a couple of Ascend MAX-TNT's, and not need the overhead of giant co-lo facilities and expensive networks. That's less than $1M of gear, plus monthly operating expenses, which I would expect to be sustainable.
I spent the last year working as a sysadmin for a company that operated similarly in the southeast, and had some comparable - if higher - dollar figures, but we had 50 ISP's and over 300,000 customers. When I left, they weren't in great shape, but their head was still above water. That many customers can provide an awesome amount of cash flow. Being tasked with sending out the global email to all customers, announcing our impending doom, is something I never had the joy of experiencing (ha!).
In the end though, it's a question of whether or not the company that exists is worth: a.) operating as it is, b.) absorbing it into yet a larger provider, or c.) simply letting it disappear. In the first case, some management change-outs and heavy infusions of capital could bring the company out of the red long enough to make things self-sustaining once again. Some employees end up on the street, others make it big, but the customers shouldn't notice much, if anything.
If their network and most of their kit is crap, though, some larger company may or may not decide to risk that aquisition. Depending on their skill, such a transition could go smoothly and unnoticed, or horribly, and involve lengthy outages. It could be as simple as putting LMP's on all the dial-up numbers to point them at your own gear, and migrating webservers and mailservers, or it could be just a total unscalable mess.
If so, they may close the doors and go away. I would expect customers to be notified at that point - there is no face left to save by then. The assets (servers, routers, workstation, miles of Cat-5) will get liquidated, circuits turned down, power shut off, and the locks changed before the old datacenter gets turned into a Gap or something. --
Why do postmasters shudder at the thought of knowing anything about SMTP 821?
That is to say, "RFC 821", not "SMTP 821". SMTP 821 is, of course, the part number for Charmin Extra-Soft 2-Ply ("Soft Motherfuckin Toilet Paper #821"), not to be confused with RFC 821, which outlines the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, existence of which is known about by far too few admins of mailservers on this net.
Nuh-huh. A suspect, possibly, but ruled out rather quickly, one would have hoped.
Why is it that when you hope somebody - be it a higher-up in corporate-land, a cop, the sysadmin of somebody else's server you have to deal with - is knowledgeable of their particular niche in computing, they aren't? Why is the VP of Operations of my previous employer incapable of checking his email with anything other than the web interface? Why do postmasters shudder at the thought of knowing anything about SMTP 821? Why do FBI investigations seem to go after the wrong guy, for doing the wrong things, if going after anybody at all?
A company I used to work for had a billing database stolen over a year ago. This was a big deal, as it involved an employee, some DoS attacks, and lots of stolen credit card numbers. It would be over six months before the SBI called any of us for questioning. I wasn't even working there when this all happened, but I did find a couple more backdoors that had been left behind on some windoze boxes there. That was in the Spring of this year - haven't heard a word from them since. And the investigator admitted right off the bat that his technical knowledge on this kind of thing was quite limited. *sigh* WHY THE FSCK IS HE INVESTIGATING COMPUTER CRIMES IF HE DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT COMPUTERS?! Either the guy was good at playing the fool, or I really did explain Back-Orifice to him for the first time. I couldn't offer much more than some basic theories, though, since the details were all way before my arrival on the scene.
The guy in this article obviously did enough poking around to create a noticeable amount of logfiles. But, this is all post-mortem. A second look and some thinking about the situation would cause me to think this was NOT the cracker, if I were trying to investigate this. I'd sure be a lot more interested in logs created before the break-in, if any still existed, than some TCP connects and a zone transfer that occurred some time after. Those are things the cracker would have done BEFOREhand, not after the fact. On an 0wn3d box, I would only expect to see attempts to access the backdoor(s) left behind, rather than full-on portscans and zone transfers. If it were just a simple website defacement, I might not expect to ever see the cracker try to connect again, as they've done their deed for the day and know better than to return. The fact that all this happened would lead me to believe that any evidence leading back to those truly responsible was indeed pretty much eliminated, leaving this poor sap in the spotlight after traipsing around like he did.
Which is all the more reason why this kind of seizure is not justifiable. What are they looking for on his computer, the "Log of Yankees websites I have hacked"? "HOW TO HACK AND CRACK AND DO ILLEGAL THINGS - A Guide by Dilinger"? "Top 10 Reasons Why the FBI Will Never Catch Me"? "Photo album of me cracking websites - Autumn/2000"? Follow up on leads, sure, but no need for the heavy-handed treatment based on the evidence at hand.
Sheesh.
This just reeks of people who don't know what they're doing. (God, I really hate baseball, too. I only crack hockey-team websites.) --
You make me jealous... money isn't everything, but in this case it's at least a start.
I work for an ISP (one of the largest privately-held ones in the US) and provide on-call support for all issues (servers + networks) one out of every four weeks, and support for my particular skillset (UNIX server administration) another of those four weeks. And there's nothing stopping the lower tier from calling me at any hour the rest of the time if somebody thinks I'm the only person who can solve a particular problem (which is frequently true - we're horribly understaffed). The on-call person is not supposed to have to deal with non-critical issues - that is, issues not affecting multiple users - after hours, but that doesn't stop the escallation team from calling anyway sometimes. By the time I find out it's one luser who can't (do what-the-fsck-ever), the damage is done, and a night of restful, uninterrupted sleep is ruined.
I am salaried, and receive no bonuses or compensations whatsoever.
Bitter? Fsck, yeah. I hate it. I have had enough of it, and am actively seeking a new job.
This is very typical of my company - expecting the extra mile from employees, but never throwing them so much as a bone. Whether such treatment is due to apathy or a genuine lack of funds, I don't know, but neither is an adequate excuse. I make a decent salary, based on a 40-hr work week (ha!). It looks kinda sad at 60-hrs, and after that, well, McDonald's pays rather competitively. I like to run a smooth system, I work hard, I'm thorough, and I like to see problems fixed correctly and expediently, but lately the satisfaction of a job-well-done is just not making up for the effort it takes. It's hard to give a crap about your company when it clearly doesn't give a crap about you.
24/7 support should be provided by a 24/7 staff, in my oh-so-humble opinion. Expecting the dogs who already work 60-80 hour weeks to pick up the phone and fix crap in the middle of the night is downright greedy and inconsiderate. If you can't afford to staff 24/7, then maybe your perception of how your company is operating needs some adjustment.
</rant>
And what's more, the fact that the ALT text in the broken banner link at the top of my browser reads "We're the dot in.com" really strikes my irony bone. --
Until last week, the telecommunications company from whom I'm now trying to get fired had centralized all their UNIX admins in one location. Three of us were in one office, four in another down the hall. Given that the person for whom we worked -- CTO of the company -- understood the importance of what we did and of keeping us happy, we were free to do anything we wanted. This extended beyond simple office decoration and lighting - we wore whatever clothes we wanted, took regular frisbee breaks outside, grilled out every Friday, and kept beer in the fridge. I personally took a lot of calls on my cellphone while wandering through the woods behind the place. We weren't there to be viewed by the public, so there was no dress code. (Hell, the CTO once greeted a FedEx guy while in shorts and flipflops... FE: "Excuse me, sir, do you work here?" CTO: "Yeah, I own the joint. Who the fsck are you?") The job had many pressures, but none of them inherent by simply being at the office.
As for our actual offices: They weren't designed or built very well, so we had to make do. The walls were pretty thin - like they'd just fall over if a good breeze came along. Three of us made do in one office, while four others occupied another one. It was a tad cramped after you toss in a few desks and computers, but having us together was better than being alone in separate offices. Those were for the management types, who spent the day on the phone keeping other manglement types off our backs. We could easily ask each other questions about how such-and-such was done at one location, what the password was for server *foo*, and just make weird conversation in the meantime.
Nobody doing any serious work ever had the overhead flourescents on. A lower-powered incandescent lamp back in the corner was much more relaxing. Eventually, we tried blacklight tubes overhead, with pretty cool results. We also swapped out the soft-white bulbs in our lamps for red and blue "party-light" bulbs, and combined with the blacklights, it made for a really nice college-bachelor-pad meets dance-club meets ops-center environment. Direct light was where it was needed, and elsewhere, just the soft glow of blacklight and several monitors. And while our office took the route of a spotlit mirror ball, the other went christmas-light crazy. We wrote nasty things about our subsidiaries on the whiteboards, and in yellow highlighter on the walls (only visible in the blacklight, see). Laetitia Casta still hangs to the right of my desk with promises of August 19 falling on a Saturday.
Music was definitely an integral part of our happiness. At my previous orkplace, music consisted of a tired old boombox, permanently tuned into the classic rock station, which frequently got turned down or off for the benefit of a phone call being made by one of the four cow-orkers in that office. That sucked. Here, everybody had satellite/subwoofer systems, and being of the same early-20's age bracket, there was a lot of overlap in our musical preferences. So that was nice, at least until other businesses in the adjoining suites started complaining about the volume.
Working there was even more enjoyable than working from home, which I've also done. I actually looked forward to going in in the morning, and frequently stayed late. There was no fear of "Omigod, the VP of *foo* is coming today, everybody clean up!" As long as we got our work done, and there was lots of work, there were no complaints. The architecture was not in any visual or physical design; it was in building a group of people who could get anything done, and keeping us happy to work there. All of the old paradigms of a "proper office environment" -- fake plastic trees, desk drawers full of paperclips and ink pens, suits and ties -- took a backseat to our stolen road signs, desk drawers full of empty cans, and shorts and t-shirts. Unfortunately, the company just went through a major reorganization, and damn near everybody has been moved out of here once again. I'm looking for another job now, but I doubt I'll ever have another workplace quite like this one. --
Microsoft's webpage is run on NT servers, and it's *never* been Slashdotted
This isn't really the point, as the issue is DNS and not OS reliability or security, but microsoft.com does get knocked over. See here - home.microsoft.com, running IIS on NT4, telling me "Server too busy." (You'll just have to take my word it that I didn't doctor that screenshot any. I thought it was so funny when that happened, I had to capture it.)
"With DAT there was some sort of digital signature (i forget the TLA) that was written to the tape that ment that the tape had to copied by the machine that produced the master. A box of tricks costing £100 (ish) got rid of that and you could freely copy DATs."
Ahh, that would be SCMS -- Serial Copying Management System. *ptooey* This depended on the hardware to check for a couple of flags on the recording - the L bit (0 for original recordings, and 1 for a first-generation copy) and the copyright bit - to determine whether to allow or disallow copying. Not really encryption, just a control check, and only consumer-level DAT machines bothered obeying. Pro DAT players typically ignore it, or can easily be set to ignore it, and nowadays, pro DAT decks are about the only ones in use. Any wonder why? (Well, there were plenty of other reasons consumer DAT sucked, but that's getting off topic.)
The MP3 audio format was one of the final nails in the coffin. Fast, high quality and small audio files distributed freely are rapidly killing off sales of CD's. Well, so we are lead to believe by the music industry.
Yep. They're damned fools for not seeing the forest through the trees. Capitalism isn't about saying "No, you can't have that (i.e. no decrypting DVD's, no distributing mp3's)". It's about saying "Yes, you can have that, and only for the low low price of $X." Those who oppose secondhand and thirdhand distribution of digital media are missing out, and wasting a lot of time, effort, and money in trying to stifle technology.
Before long, we're going to have unencrypted, high-fidelity digital compression formats for any video or audio you want, and more importantly, the bandwidth to handle it. There is no stopping this. There is only the choice to embrace it and look for ways to make a buck from it, or continue dragging one's knuckes trying to stop it.
The so called "journalist" who wrote this should take some english classes. First off, according to MLA format, quotes should be used when you are quoting something, not accentuating a point.
You saw quotation marks? I simply saw question marks all over the place. I guess it is asking too much for a site called "internet.com" to be able to use a proper character set. There didn't seem to be any problems with the well over a dozen occurrences of parentheses, though.
Furrfu!
Those are bad habits for a writer, Brett - lose them, but quickly. --
You should understand that it is a well-founded rule of nature that any flame regarding incorrect spelling or grammar will itself always contain an error of similar scope. (Jokes about who this rule should be named after are left as an exercise to the reader.) --
If I spend more than just a few minutes at my machine with anything but the correct posture, my wrists and the backs of my hands start to ache. So I just settle down and assume the proper position, which for me is: Sitting up somewhat straight, elbows on the armrests of my desk chair, wrists on a beefy wristpad on the desktop (I use two rolled up bar towels), fingers on the home keys. If my wrists have to tilt up to reach the keys, pain... Typically, it feels much better within moments of adjusting my posture though.
Oddly, unlike a number of other posters, I have no problems with the mouse, except for a couple of times I was randomly surfing for several hours and my hand locked in the shape of the mouse. And the other hand - it was holding a Mountain Dew can, I swear. --
I'm sure they'll get around to these, in addition to the other revisions they mentioned:
fsck(8) -- becomes know(8), as in the biblical sense: "And the user did know(8) his partition, and thus begat lost+found."
gcc(1) -- becomes jhc(1). "JHC, how much longer is this compile going to take?!?!" (Must be asked sincerely to avoid blasphemy.)
more(1) -- wholly (pardon the pun) replaced with less(1), the opposite of more, because it is selfish to want more.
true(1) -- can only return a value of 0.
expect -- replaced with "prophesize", a lesser known subset of tcl.
C++ programs are now said to be abject-oriented, as they will only compile and run after sufficient subjugation and hours of blood-soaked sweat inducing prayer (which is not entirely unique to this distribution).
Christmas -- is always referred to as Xmas (see/usr/X11R6/bin/Xmas).
guile -- is an immoral trait, and thus is removed from the distribution.
help -- available to all unsaved souls who ask. See also: save, gideon.
nice(1) -- applied to all user functions, because Jesux brothers should all be nice to one another.
/etc/HOSTNAME -- renamed to/etc/HEAVENLYHOSTNAME.
MySQL(1) -- is now HisSQL(1), because after all, He created it, and all of us who use it, and it is His. Sinners on the system are relegated to TransGresSQL, PostGres' replacement.
nslookup(8) -- replaced with nsbowyourheads(8).
and finally...
root -- becomes God, obviously. "God, root, what is difference?" -- Pitr 0:0
Whether these were funny or not, I blame it all on the Mountain Dew. --
Look at the bill. Scroll down. Scroll down some more. Stop.
14-458. Computer trespass; penalty.
Read that bit.
"It shall be unlawful for any person to use a computer or computer network without authority [to] temporarily or permanently remove, halt, or otherwise disable any computer data, computer programs, or computer software from a computer or computer network... cause a computer to malfunction, regardless of how long the malfunction persists... alter or erase any computer data... Make an unauthorized copy [of] any printed or electronic form of computer data"
I think this section is far more powerful than the anti-spam bit. Not only can that stuff get you fired, kicked out of school, or your ISP account cancelled, but as of 12/1/99 you can get prosecuted and fined, too. Were it not for the "without authority" clause, installing Windows 98 over a LAN could be classified as criminal. Even so...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you don't have to guess -- you can just make stuff up! Team Polizei crapped on my lawn! Alex Roy hates white people! I have a hotel on the moon!
Team Polizei were not involved in that accident. There was no second Team Polizei car. They may be guilty of untold numbers of moving violations, but that one was not one of theirs. Please keep your team members of the idiots straight.
You mean "who are NOT named", because they aren't in that second story at all, and because they were never part of Team Polizei.
Team Polizei -- Alex Roy and Michael Ross during the 2007 Gumball -- are not Nicholas Morley and Matthew McConville.
From a website dedicated to the quaint little village in which I grew up:
http://www.towndock.net/
http://www.towndock.net/isabelreport.html
http://www.towndock.net/isabelreport1.html
A better answer is having an ssh identity key set up with no passphrase. When it comes to automated tasks, especially for privileged accounts, one can use the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (or ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 for ssh2) to lock down what hosts can or cannot use the key, what commands can be run, and enable or disable other ssh features as needed. That way, a passphrase-less key for running file transfers doesn't have to lead to an interactive shell.
n c --server -vlogDtprx . /var/backups",no-pty,no-port-forwarding,no-X11-f orwarding,no-agent-forwarding 1024 35 1234567890[...the actual key...] backups to home
If I have to, say, automate an rsync of something from a remote box, I set up a new identity key just for that task, and use the -i flag in the local ssh command to specify use of that key. The remote box's authorized_keys file is setup to only allow my one local box to use that key, to only run that one rsync command, with only the arguments specified, and disables pty allocation, port forwarding, X11 forwarding, and agent forwarding. The authorized_keys entry looks like this (all on one line):
from="my.workstation.bar",command="/usr/bin/rsy
man sshd and check out the authorized_keys section.
Doesn't one have to already be enabled to see the encrypted passwords in a running config, though?
I suppose I'll have a go. From my .tcshrc:
set prompt = "%B[%c]%n@%m:%l%#%b "
(PS: This has been my sig here for years. Finally, it is appropriate.)
--
My company has been getting a bunch of 2-U SPARC clones from Craig-Warner, each of which has 2 PCI slots that are made usable by 90-degree L-shaped adapters. They're a pain in the ass to actually get PCI cards into, but they work; we stick a SCSI card and 4-port NIC into them. You might give those guys a call if you need help tracking some down.
--
But, but, (not to suggest that you personally agree with this), what is the rule that says a mailhost should only accept email from other hosts that have MX records? MX records are for determining the destination of mail, and have nothing to do with its origin. Sites of any size frequently use different machines for end-user outgoing SMTP relay, rather than their main incoming MX hosts, in order to shed unnecessary load.
--
Baz "It's a Hot Cut" Quux
(PS - I added the extra syllable back to "hinderance" - your rube dialect seems to be slipping, Mr. Joiner...)
--
So what's the problem with the bookshelf-style storage? I've got around 500 CD's, and they go really well on a set of shelves I built out of pine. They're similar to what radio stations use - each shelf is just high enough to accomodate a jewel box, and has a stop-rail along the back so all the fronts line up and don't slide all the way back. Pine's really cheap, and the construction couldn't be simpler. Scalability? Either add more shelves, or spend another $20/2hrs building another set.
I'd give more info, but I was just re-alphabetizing my collection, and now I have to start all over again... fsck...
--
Man, having to contact all of the static-IP users was bad enough, I feel for you having to call anybody whose username collided!
--
So, they borrowed a bunch of money, set up a 6,000-sq.ft. co-lo datacenter, built their own fault-tolerant, fiber-optic backbone, and ended up with only 15,000 customers? (Where did that figure from above come from anyway? I couldn't find it on the link given.) That's awfully low.
You could easily put 15,000 users on a few Ultra-II's, a couple of DS-3's, and maybe a couple of Ascend MAX-TNT's, and not need the overhead of giant co-lo facilities and expensive networks. That's less than $1M of gear, plus monthly operating expenses, which I would expect to be sustainable.
I spent the last year working as a sysadmin for a company that operated similarly in the southeast, and had some comparable - if higher - dollar figures, but we had 50 ISP's and over 300,000 customers. When I left, they weren't in great shape, but their head was still above water. That many customers can provide an awesome amount of cash flow. Being tasked with sending out the global email to all customers, announcing our impending doom, is something I never had the joy of experiencing (ha!).
In the end though, it's a question of whether or not the company that exists is worth: a.) operating as it is, b.) absorbing it into yet a larger provider, or c.) simply letting it disappear. In the first case, some management change-outs and heavy infusions of capital could bring the company out of the red long enough to make things self-sustaining once again. Some employees end up on the street, others make it big, but the customers shouldn't notice much, if anything.
If their network and most of their kit is crap, though, some larger company may or may not decide to risk that aquisition. Depending on their skill, such a transition could go smoothly and unnoticed, or horribly, and involve lengthy outages. It could be as simple as putting LMP's on all the dial-up numbers to point them at your own gear, and migrating webservers and mailservers, or it could be just a total unscalable mess.
If so, they may close the doors and go away. I would expect customers to be notified at that point - there is no face left to save by then. The assets (servers, routers, workstation, miles of Cat-5) will get liquidated, circuits turned down, power shut off, and the locks changed before the old datacenter gets turned into a Gap or something.
--
That is to say, "RFC 821", not "SMTP 821". SMTP 821 is, of course, the part number for Charmin Extra-Soft 2-Ply ("Soft Motherfuckin Toilet Paper #821"), not to be confused with RFC 821, which outlines the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, existence of which is known about by far too few admins of mailservers on this net.
--
Nuh-huh. A suspect, possibly, but ruled out rather quickly, one would have hoped.
Why is it that when you hope somebody - be it a higher-up in corporate-land, a cop, the sysadmin of somebody else's server you have to deal with - is knowledgeable of their particular niche in computing, they aren't? Why is the VP of Operations of my previous employer incapable of checking his email with anything other than the web interface? Why do postmasters shudder at the thought of knowing anything about SMTP 821? Why do FBI investigations seem to go after the wrong guy, for doing the wrong things, if going after anybody at all?
A company I used to work for had a billing database stolen over a year ago. This was a big deal, as it involved an employee, some DoS attacks, and lots of stolen credit card numbers. It would be over six months before the SBI called any of us for questioning. I wasn't even working there when this all happened, but I did find a couple more backdoors that had been left behind on some windoze boxes there. That was in the Spring of this year - haven't heard a word from them since. And the investigator admitted right off the bat that his technical knowledge on this kind of thing was quite limited. *sigh* WHY THE FSCK IS HE INVESTIGATING COMPUTER CRIMES IF HE DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT COMPUTERS?! Either the guy was good at playing the fool, or I really did explain Back-Orifice to him for the first time. I couldn't offer much more than some basic theories, though, since the details were all way before my arrival on the scene.
The guy in this article obviously did enough poking around to create a noticeable amount of logfiles. But, this is all post-mortem. A second look and some thinking about the situation would cause me to think this was NOT the cracker, if I were trying to investigate this. I'd sure be a lot more interested in logs created before the break-in, if any still existed, than some TCP connects and a zone transfer that occurred some time after. Those are things the cracker would have done BEFOREhand, not after the fact. On an 0wn3d box, I would only expect to see attempts to access the backdoor(s) left behind, rather than full-on portscans and zone transfers. If it were just a simple website defacement, I might not expect to ever see the cracker try to connect again, as they've done their deed for the day and know better than to return. The fact that all this happened would lead me to believe that any evidence leading back to those truly responsible was indeed pretty much eliminated, leaving this poor sap in the spotlight after traipsing around like he did.
Which is all the more reason why this kind of seizure is not justifiable. What are they looking for on his computer, the "Log of Yankees websites I have hacked"? "HOW TO HACK AND CRACK AND DO ILLEGAL THINGS - A Guide by Dilinger"? "Top 10 Reasons Why the FBI Will Never Catch Me"? "Photo album of me cracking websites - Autumn/2000"? Follow up on leads, sure, but no need for the heavy-handed treatment based on the evidence at hand.
Sheesh.
This just reeks of people who don't know what they're doing. (God, I really hate baseball, too. I only crack hockey-team websites.)
--
You make me jealous... money isn't everything, but in this case it's at least a start.
I work for an ISP (one of the largest privately-held ones in the US) and provide on-call support for all issues (servers + networks) one out of every four weeks, and support for my particular skillset (UNIX server administration) another of those four weeks. And there's nothing stopping the lower tier from calling me at any hour the rest of the time if somebody thinks I'm the only person who can solve a particular problem (which is frequently true - we're horribly understaffed). The on-call person is not supposed to have to deal with non-critical issues - that is, issues not affecting multiple users - after hours, but that doesn't stop the escallation team from calling anyway sometimes. By the time I find out it's one luser who can't (do what-the-fsck-ever), the damage is done, and a night of restful, uninterrupted sleep is ruined.
I am salaried, and receive no bonuses or compensations whatsoever.
Bitter? Fsck, yeah. I hate it. I have had enough of it, and am actively seeking a new job.
This is very typical of my company - expecting the extra mile from employees, but never throwing them so much as a bone. Whether such treatment is due to apathy or a genuine lack of funds, I don't know, but neither is an adequate excuse. I make a decent salary, based on a 40-hr work week (ha!). It looks kinda sad at 60-hrs, and after that, well, McDonald's pays rather competitively. I like to run a smooth system, I work hard, I'm thorough, and I like to see problems fixed correctly and expediently, but lately the satisfaction of a job-well-done is just not making up for the effort it takes. It's hard to give a crap about your company when it clearly doesn't give a crap about you.
24/7 support should be provided by a 24/7 staff, in my oh-so-humble opinion. Expecting the dogs who already work 60-80 hour weeks to pick up the phone and fix crap in the middle of the night is downright greedy and inconsiderate. If you can't afford to staff 24/7, then maybe your perception of how your company is operating needs some adjustment.
</rant>
And what's more, the fact that the ALT text in the broken banner link at the top of my browser reads "We're the dot in
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Until last week, the telecommunications company from whom I'm now trying to get fired had centralized all their UNIX admins in one location. Three of us were in one office, four in another down the hall. Given that the person for whom we worked -- CTO of the company -- understood the importance of what we did and of keeping us happy, we were free to do anything we wanted. This extended beyond simple office decoration and lighting - we wore whatever clothes we wanted, took regular frisbee breaks outside, grilled out every Friday, and kept beer in the fridge. I personally took a lot of calls on my cellphone while wandering through the woods behind the place. We weren't there to be viewed by the public, so there was no dress code. (Hell, the CTO once greeted a FedEx guy while in shorts and flipflops... FE: "Excuse me, sir, do you work here?" CTO: "Yeah, I own the joint. Who the fsck are you?") The job had many pressures, but none of them inherent by simply being at the office.
As for our actual offices: They weren't designed or built very well, so we had to make do. The walls were pretty thin - like they'd just fall over if a good breeze came along. Three of us made do in one office, while four others occupied another one. It was a tad cramped after you toss in a few desks and computers, but having us together was better than being alone in separate offices. Those were for the management types, who spent the day on the phone keeping other manglement types off our backs. We could easily ask each other questions about how such-and-such was done at one location, what the password was for server *foo*, and just make weird conversation in the meantime.
Nobody doing any serious work ever had the overhead flourescents on. A lower-powered incandescent lamp back in the corner was much more relaxing. Eventually, we tried blacklight tubes overhead, with pretty cool results. We also swapped out the soft-white bulbs in our lamps for red and blue "party-light" bulbs, and combined with the blacklights, it made for a really nice college-bachelor-pad meets dance-club meets ops-center environment. Direct light was where it was needed, and elsewhere, just the soft glow of blacklight and several monitors. And while our office took the route of a spotlit mirror ball, the other went christmas-light crazy. We wrote nasty things about our subsidiaries on the whiteboards, and in yellow highlighter on the walls (only visible in the blacklight, see). Laetitia Casta still hangs to the right of my desk with promises of August 19 falling on a Saturday.
Music was definitely an integral part of our happiness. At my previous orkplace, music consisted of a tired old boombox, permanently tuned into the classic rock station, which frequently got turned down or off for the benefit of a phone call being made by one of the four cow-orkers in that office. That sucked. Here, everybody had satellite/subwoofer systems, and being of the same early-20's age bracket, there was a lot of overlap in our musical preferences. So that was nice, at least until other businesses in the adjoining suites started complaining about the volume.
Working there was even more enjoyable than working from home, which I've also done. I actually looked forward to going in in the morning, and frequently stayed late. There was no fear of "Omigod, the VP of *foo* is coming today, everybody clean up!" As long as we got our work done, and there was lots of work, there were no complaints. The architecture was not in any visual or physical design; it was in building a group of people who could get anything done, and keeping us happy to work there. All of the old paradigms of a "proper office environment" -- fake plastic trees, desk drawers full of paperclips and ink pens, suits and ties -- took a backseat to our stolen road signs, desk drawers full of empty cans, and shorts and t-shirts. Unfortunately, the company just went through a major reorganization, and damn near everybody has been moved out of here once again. I'm looking for another job now, but I doubt I'll ever have another workplace quite like this one.
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This isn't really the point, as the issue is DNS and not OS reliability or security, but microsoft.com does get knocked over. See here - home.microsoft.com, running IIS on NT4, telling me "Server too busy." (You'll just have to take my word it that I didn't doctor that screenshot any. I thought it was so funny when that happened, I had to capture it.)
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Ahh, that would be SCMS -- Serial Copying Management System. *ptooey* This depended on the hardware to check for a couple of flags on the recording - the L bit (0 for original recordings, and 1 for a first-generation copy) and the copyright bit - to determine whether to allow or disallow copying. Not really encryption, just a control check, and only consumer-level DAT machines bothered obeying. Pro DAT players typically ignore it, or can easily be set to ignore it, and nowadays, pro DAT decks are about the only ones in use. Any wonder why? (Well, there were plenty of other reasons consumer DAT sucked, but that's getting off topic.)
Yep. They're damned fools for not seeing the forest through the trees. Capitalism isn't about saying "No, you can't have that (i.e. no decrypting DVD's, no distributing mp3's)". It's about saying "Yes, you can have that, and only for the low low price of $X." Those who oppose secondhand and thirdhand distribution of digital media are missing out, and wasting a lot of time, effort, and money in trying to stifle technology.
Before long, we're going to have unencrypted, high-fidelity digital compression formats for any video or audio you want, and more importantly, the bandwidth to handle it. There is no stopping this. There is only the choice to embrace it and look for ways to make a buck from it, or continue dragging one's knuckes trying to stop it.
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You have exceptional taste.
It's funny how the entire Mahler or Bruckner cycle can play in what seems like only a couple of hours. And then it's daylight again...
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You saw quotation marks? I simply saw question marks all over the place. I guess it is asking too much for a site called "internet.com" to be able to use a proper character set. There didn't seem to be any problems with the well over a dozen occurrences of parentheses, though.
Furrfu!
Those are bad habits for a writer, Brett - lose them, but quickly.
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You should understand that it is a well-founded rule of nature that any flame regarding incorrect spelling or grammar will itself always contain an error of similar scope. (Jokes about who this rule should be named after are left as an exercise to the reader.)
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IANAD, and IANEAP, but:
If I spend more than just a few minutes at my machine with anything but the correct posture, my wrists and the backs of my hands start to ache. So I just settle down and assume the proper position, which for me is: Sitting up somewhat straight, elbows on the armrests of my desk chair, wrists on a beefy wristpad on the desktop (I use two rolled up bar towels), fingers on the home keys. If my wrists have to tilt up to reach the keys, pain... Typically, it feels much better within moments of adjusting my posture though.
Oddly, unlike a number of other posters, I have no problems with the mouse, except for a couple of times I was randomly surfing for several hours and my hand locked in the shape of the mouse. And the other hand - it was holding a Mountain Dew can, I swear.
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I'm sure they'll get around to these, in addition to the other revisions they mentioned:
/usr/X11R6/bin/Xmas).
/etc/HEAVENLYHOSTNAME.
fsck(8) -- becomes know(8), as in the biblical sense: "And the user did know(8) his partition, and thus begat lost+found."
gcc(1) -- becomes jhc(1). "JHC, how much longer is this compile going to take?!?!" (Must be asked sincerely to avoid blasphemy.)
more(1) -- wholly (pardon the pun) replaced with less(1), the opposite of more, because it is selfish to want more.
true(1) -- can only return a value of 0.
expect -- replaced with "prophesize", a lesser known subset of tcl.
C++ programs are now said to be abject-oriented, as they will only compile and run after sufficient subjugation and hours of blood-soaked sweat inducing prayer (which is not entirely unique to this distribution).
Christmas -- is always referred to as Xmas (see
guile -- is an immoral trait, and thus is removed from the distribution.
help -- available to all unsaved souls who ask. See also: save, gideon.
nice(1) -- applied to all user functions, because Jesux brothers should all be nice to one another.
/etc/HOSTNAME -- renamed to
MySQL(1) -- is now HisSQL(1), because after all, He created it, and all of us who use it, and it is His. Sinners on the system are relegated to TransGresSQL, PostGres' replacement.
nslookup(8) -- replaced with nsbowyourheads(8).
and finally...
root -- becomes God, obviously. "God, root, what is difference?" -- Pitr 0:0
Whether these were funny or not, I blame it all on the Mountain Dew.
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Don't worry, I'm sure we'll outlaw improper capitalization too, eventually -- revoke your driver license or something. =)
Look at the bill. Scroll down. Scroll down some more. Stop.
14-458. Computer trespass; penalty.
Read that bit.
I think this section is far more powerful than the anti-spam bit. Not only can that stuff get you fired, kicked out of school, or your ISP account cancelled, but as of 12/1/99 you can get prosecuted and fined, too. Were it not for the "without authority" clause, installing Windows 98 over a LAN could be classified as criminal. Even so...