My ISP has always had transparent proxy servers for outgoing requests, so as soon as I heard about this and noticed my webserver logs growing several orders of magnitude faster than they normally do, I politely asked my ISP if they could get those transparent proxies dropping nimda-type requests.
Uncharacteristically, they actually paid some attention, and gave me a nice polite reply and a few days later they had gone several steps further. Not only did they block the nimda probes, they also blocked the IE exploit and incoming nimda probes from outside. They also put monitoring software on the proxies so that users who send out a certain amount of nimda probes will automagically get their account suspended and a letter dispatched explaining why.
I'm happy with what they did. It's made those transparent proxies a whole lot more responsive since they aren't constantly forwarding stupid probes from clueless 'admins' who are actually just users who accidentally turned on IIS. All home ISPs should do this - carefully, of course - in order to keep known worms under reasonable control.
Even better (although more annoying in the short term for people who browse sites which sanity-check the string) is to push the point home with a completely stupid-looking user-agent string and a comment in it such as "Browser statistics mean nothing, you fool."
I'll second this... I watched Sliders series 1-4 on UK Terrestrial TV, right up until the point where Wade's actress left and Quinn was left standing around in some strange futuristic place... then the BBC stopped showing it indefinitely.
I got cable TV some time later, and watched some of what was, it seems by your descriptions, the last series. It was terrible, it has to be said. ('Composite' Quinn Malorie?!) The thing about the batteries running out in the timer was just the last straw. Pathetic.
I continue to hope that either the BBC or Sky One will show some of the earlier Sliders episodes again so I can see the ones I missed the first time around.
The general idea is that another of the 69,000 hackers would spot the backdoor and fix/remove it, and alert people. With that many people seeing the code, and patches getting reviewed by lots of people before they go into the "official" release, it's difficult to slip in a backdoor and still have people use your patches/code in the future.
Presumably the "responsible adult" who is responsible for managing this filtering wouldn't have parental filtering on themselves.
Of course, this does involve the parent logging on as themselves to vet the content, but if a child really needed it I think most parents would take the time.
Oh, British students do that too. I had an extra special snigger about that when, at school, we were browsing brochures selecting universities for applications.
Rather than getting Jabber clients to talk to AIM, why not get AIM clients to talk to Jabber?
The proxy idea in the article was what started me thinking on this. Someone needs to write an AIM proxy which forwards everything on to AIM's real servers, and convince the clients to connect to one of these. The trick is that screennames in a given format (I don't know what this would be, since I don't have AIM around to explore valid screennames and such) would cause a message to be translated into a Jabber request and forwarded on to a Jabber server.
This is of course only a rough idea, but I think it could work. AIM Users who wish to talk to people on Jabber, ICQ etc would be able to install this proxy on their machine and use HOSTS to point the AIM server address at 127.0.0.1, or those reluctant to do this could probably sign up to a 'public' one of these. The only problem with the public ones is that it gives AOL something to IP-block...
In the UK, we have separate domains for schools and colleges/universities. Schools are in schoolname.borough.sch.uk *, while universities are at universityname.ac.uk. This seems to work quite well, I think, especially since there are lots of schools with the same name, especially those named after christian saints.
* A borough is an area governed by a particular local council, although in the case where a county is quite small, a whole county may have the same council and I presume share the same school domain.
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My ISP has always had transparent proxy servers for outgoing requests, so as soon as I heard about this and noticed my webserver logs growing several orders of magnitude faster than they normally do, I politely asked my ISP if they could get those transparent proxies dropping nimda-type requests.
Uncharacteristically, they actually paid some attention, and gave me a nice polite reply and a few days later they had gone several steps further. Not only did they block the nimda probes, they also blocked the IE exploit and incoming nimda probes from outside. They also put monitoring software on the proxies so that users who send out a certain amount of nimda probes will automagically get their account suspended and a letter dispatched explaining why.
I'm happy with what they did. It's made those transparent proxies a whole lot more responsive since they aren't constantly forwarding stupid probes from clueless 'admins' who are actually just users who accidentally turned on IIS. All home ISPs should do this - carefully, of course - in order to keep known worms under reasonable control.
Even better (although more annoying in the short term for people who browse sites which sanity-check the string) is to push the point home with a completely stupid-looking user-agent string and a comment in it such as "Browser statistics mean nothing, you fool."
That'll learn 'em!
Erm, I was told I needed a Mac in order to do that...
Google is about the only one which remains discernable in their tiny little screenshots on the winners page. A testiment to minimal design.
I'll second this... I watched Sliders series 1-4 on UK Terrestrial TV, right up until the point where Wade's actress left and Quinn was left standing around in some strange futuristic place... then the BBC stopped showing it indefinitely.
I got cable TV some time later, and watched some of what was, it seems by your descriptions, the last series. It was terrible, it has to be said. ('Composite' Quinn Malorie?!) The thing about the batteries running out in the timer was just the last straw. Pathetic.
I continue to hope that either the BBC or Sky One will show some of the earlier Sliders episodes again so I can see the ones I missed the first time around.
You made the same point twice. In other words, you made the same point twice.
No, HTTP allows you to determine the type and version of browser that the client has been configured to pretend to be.
The general idea is that another of the 69,000 hackers would spot the backdoor and fix/remove it, and alert people. With that many people seeing the code, and patches getting reviewed by lots of people before they go into the "official" release, it's difficult to slip in a backdoor and still have people use your patches/code in the future.
Presumably the "responsible adult" who is responsible for managing this filtering wouldn't have parental filtering on themselves.
Of course, this does involve the parent logging on as themselves to vet the content, but if a child really needed it I think most parents would take the time.
Oh, British students do that too. I had an extra special snigger about that when, at school, we were browsing brochures selecting universities for applications.
Rather than getting Jabber clients to talk to AIM, why not get AIM clients to talk to Jabber?
The proxy idea in the article was what started me thinking on this. Someone needs to write an AIM proxy which forwards everything on to AIM's real servers, and convince the clients to connect to one of these. The trick is that screennames in a given format (I don't know what this would be, since I don't have AIM around to explore valid screennames and such) would cause a message to be translated into a Jabber request and forwarded on to a Jabber server.
This is of course only a rough idea, but I think it could work. AIM Users who wish to talk to people on Jabber, ICQ etc would be able to install this proxy on their machine and use HOSTS to point the AIM server address at 127.0.0.1, or those reluctant to do this could probably sign up to a 'public' one of these. The only problem with the public ones is that it gives AOL something to IP-block...
In the UK, we have separate domains for schools and colleges/universities. Schools are in schoolname.borough.sch.uk *, while universities are at universityname.ac.uk. This seems to work quite well, I think, especially since there are lots of schools with the same name, especially those named after christian saints.
* A borough is an area governed by a particular local council, although in the case where a county is quite small, a whole county may have the same council and I presume share the same school domain.
Interestingly, this linux client doesn't appear (from the screenshots) to carry ads.