I will sell, to the highest bidder, a lottery ticket in the year 2014 which will guarantee you a 1 in a million chance of winning a multi-million dollar jackpot.
Boy, the media should pick up on this story and cause some hysteria.
Do you think worms create phony domain names and then do a DNS query to find the random IP address? Of course not! They simply create a random IP address in the first place.
Given that domain names can be up to 63 characters long now, this basically means that Verisign is illegally squatting on:
a-z = 26 0-9 = 10 hypen = 1
63^37.com domain names
So for.com,.net, and.org you can triple that, though it's kind of moot at this point.
What's the financial penalty for domain squatting per domain? I think Verisign just bankrupted each employee's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchi ldren.
The script has a bug, for some reason it fails to work on words with three or less characters. Hopefully that'll be fixed in the next release.
Did you raed the pgae at all? The piont is taht you keep the frist and lsat lerttes the smae, so for a trhee letetr wrod (or lses) nthoing gtes chenagd. Idoit!:)
"Yoran helped to found network scanning company RipTech Inc. of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1998. After RipTech was acquired by antivirus giant Symantec Corp. for $145 million in August 2002, Yoran stayed on as Symantec vice president of worldwide managed security services operations, according to Symantec spokesman Cris Paden."
Anyone care to wager how soon the government starts awarding contracts/grants to Symantec for its exclusive security solution?
You should try KDE's KMail with gpg integration. It is milk-simple and as easy to use as a nipple.
So given the experience that the male population on Slashdot has had with the gender owning said nipples, does that mean you're saying it's very difficult?
If micropayments ever become ubiquitous, I think we'll start seeing the old "salami slicing" hack again. When a lot of stuff you do online costs a nickel here, a penny there, a dime elsewhere... you can rack of some pretty serious numbers of transactions just browsing around. After all, if loading that New York Times article linked to from Slashdot is only 2 cents, who cares, right?
But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to steal 1 cent a month from 1,000,000 people who use micropayments? After all, who's going to notice a line item titled "News article ----- $0.01"? So there's $10,000/month that nobody's really going to miss.
And for a single penny, would most people take the time to make a phone call or write an email to request clarification on where that charge originated? Even if all you make is a pitiful $3.60/hour, that one penny takes a mere 6 seconds to earn, far shorter than the time it would take to investigate. And is the micropayment company going to investigate your 1 cent dispute? Likely they would ignore you or even just automatically refund your penny without much thought.
I mean, I don't live there, and haven't, in fact, ever even been there... But it may be something to look into.
[random country here], perhaps?
I mean, I don't live there, and haven't, in fact, ever even been there, and to be honest, I don't know a thing about it other than what I've seen in pretty pictures, and I haven't heard about it one way or the other quite frankly... But it may be something to look into.
There is a difference between trolling and being outright frustrated by idiocy.
There is also a difference between calling an idea without merit (even stupid) and inferring the presenter of that idea is an idiot.
It's not a total block, as I pointed out.
I appologize for flaming you for that. I seem to have been a bit hasty reading your post. However, when I look at your first point again, I just have to ask.. how much work do you think that webinterface and the following filters would be to implement? I can't fathom the amount of ugly hacks needed. I can't see any good way to implement in any of the systems I've worked on.
I don't have your experience with various systems, but I can see how such things could be implemented. A software firewall could be modified to check whether certain ports are flagged for additional rules. If so, check the memory cache for the rules. If not present, those rules and the current person's IP is looked up in a database. The web interface could add to that database. Or the firewall could keep in memory a list of the last n port 25's accessed with a timeout value (eg: one hour). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how this presents such a tremendous challenge.
Unless someone is running their own email server... but then that's a business use not residential.
Bullshit. It's quite practical to run ones own mailserver for ones own private domains. Of course, many people "don't see the use", and think that "one can just use the ISP's outgoing mailserver". Bollocks I say.
Of course. However, many ISPs specifically state in their AUP that you are not allowed to run your own servers, so how would this be effectively any different? I understand the practical need for some to run their own mail servers. I do it myself. But "Joe Six-Pack" out there running an unpatched Windows 98 on an AOL account certainly has little need to do this.
There will always be ISPs to cater to the business/poweruser market
Indeed, and usually more expensive. What I want is quite simply a link with some bandwidth - no tech support (but a competent NOC, when things fail on their side), no bullshit. They don't need to provide a webserver, mailserver, newsserver or anything - just give me the damn bandwidth and an IP address and shut up about it. Oh, and please - they could have a good abuse department to cut off actual abusers.
And I'm sure there are ISPs which will provide this. The trick is allowing power users to have the freedom they need and keeping out the Clueless Cathys of the world from fucking it up for everyone else.
I have to admit that I haven't checked whether pine, mutt,/bin/mail or any of the other clients I tend to use have that option [proxy] -- never _Seen_ it though.
I'm talking about the regular users who use Windoze. If you use command-line mail software, you don't fall into that category. However, this is irrelevant to the technical merits (or lack thereof) of what I presented.
It's up to the ISPs as to whether this hell would be worth it to implement. Customer protection + bandwidth savings + good netizen karma > implementation hell?
Good netizen? To break end-to-end connectivity by random blocking? bullshit.
Many ISPs "break end-to-end connectivity" by blocking port 135 already, as just one example. Remember that all security is a trade-off. And nobody's forcing you to have port 25 restricted on *your* connection either. As I see it, it boils down to this: power users want high speed unrestricted connections at low cost. Clueless users with their viruses cause more technical support problems and use up more bandwidth, slowing the network down for others and incurring more costs for the ISP. This increased cost is shared by everyone, so the responsible power users are punished.
All of which are idiot solutions. It's a hack, and it's a damn ugly hack. Blocking outbound port 25 breaks the option of having an external host with authentication which you can connect to and do your stuff. Which is irritating to say the least.
[Ignoring your trolling...] It's not a total block, as I pointed out. Merely a limitation. What residential internet user really needs to connect to thousands of SMTP servers per hour directly? Er, none. Unless someone is running their own email server... but then that's a business use not residential. There will always be ISPs to cater to the business/poweruser market.
A proxy server would have to be supported by all the pieces of software in use. Not fscking likely
Only by the mail clients. How many mail clients *don't* support sending mail via proxy these days? A very rare few. And we're only talking outbound email here. And for really old clients which don't support outbound mail via proxy, instead of sending your email out through mail.yourserver.com, you simply send it out through mail.yourisp.com. As I pointed out right at the top, your ISP's port 25 wouldn't be blocked, subject to the usual volume and content restrictions.
The "allow 10 hosts per dialup connection per DHCP lease, per hour" option _could_ be alright, hadn't it been for the _slight_ problem that it would be hell to implement in most cases.
It's up to the ISPs as to whether this hell would be worth it to implement. Customer protection + bandwidth savings + good netizen karma > implementation hell?
It is true that since Sobig uses its own SMTP server the ISP would have to do the monitoring via a port 25 monitor. I'm not completely sure how difficult/expensive this would be to implement on a large scale, but there's an opportunity for someone who comes up with a cheap solution. I suppose it could be part of a general IDS, but it needs to be something price-accessible to an ISP.
This is trivial. Allow for normal port 25 access to the ISP's email server (with the usual restrictions on volume and content) and, for external port 25 access, there's a number of possibilities:
1. Allow the client to setup a pre-determined list of specific hosts they want to connect to. This might be done using a web-based interface. 2. Only allow the first 10 hosts (per dialup connection, per DHCP lease, per hour, etc.) to be accessible via port 25. This should satisfy even power users as few need to check mail on over 10 different servers. Adjust number as appropriate. 3. Setup a proxy service which allows unlimited port 25 access. Any viruses which include their own SMTP delivery engines won't know about the proxy and will simply fail. There's no additional security risk to using your ISP's proxy than using the ISP's connection itself, as both can be logged with equal ease.
Unless I misunderstand you (and I'm seriously jet-lagged), your assumption is that all Outlook clients are configured with broken mail filters? I'm sorry, that's just not true.
Most, if not all, rejection notices I've received have come from the mail server, not from the client. A lot of ISPs now offer virus scanning as a free feature in order to compete with the other ISPs which have this standard. Companies have their corporate email gateways which, more often than not, have antivirus scanning. So email getting scanned for viruses, and not by the client program, is increasingly becoming the norm.
So yes, you're correct that it doesn't double. Perhaps a 50% increase instead? Still, not insignificant.
huh? If person A's infected machine sends out 100 emails, and the one received by person Q generates a reply to sender, how does this double the amount of traffic. Sheesh! Calm down.
In the off chance that you're not just trolling, you're clearly missing the obvious. Person A sends out 100 infected emails. Person Q1's antivirus generates an email to forged sender. Person Q2's antivirus generates an email... Person Q3's antivirus generates... 97 emails later... Person Q100's antivirus generates an email.
Ergo, 100 viruses sent out, 100 replies from autogenerated "you sent an email" messages. This assumes Q1... Q100 all have antivirus filters.
...traffic than you'd have if the worm got to its target and continued spreading.
That's a lousy argument for obvious poor behavior on the part of anti-virus software. It's like saying every time the police catch a violent criminal, they should kick the ass of some random citizen. Hey, it may be annoying, but it's still less violence than you'd have if the criminal got to their target and acted violently.
I always figured the general pattern was that to work in country A, you need to be a citizen of country A or have a work permit issued by country A. Did this suddenly stop applying in the case of Americans wanting to work in India?
Better call up George Bush and have him bomb the hell out of India. How dare those Indians deny Americans their god-given right to work anywhere they damn well please?
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point... helllloooo nurse! Er, I mean... funding!
I will sell, to the highest bidder, a lottery ticket in the year 2014 which will guarantee you a 1 in a million chance of winning a multi-million dollar jackpot.
Boy, the media should pick up on this story and cause some hysteria.
Do you think worms create phony domain names and then do a DNS query to find the random IP address? Of course not! They simply create a random IP address in the first place.
A lone voice pipes up from the back of the room, "Get a Macintosh!"
Why can't we get any bigger pictures of it? Those are too small to see hardly anything.
descentr, you really should change your password. I think your girlfriend's logged in and is talking about you again.
Philo T. Farnsworth? Is he any relation to Hubert Farnsworth, inventor of the smelloscope?
No, you're thinking of Fartsworth.
Given that domain names can be up to 63 characters long now, this basically means that Verisign is illegally squatting on:
.com domain names
.com, .net, and .org you can triple that, though it's kind of moot at this point.
i ldren.
a-z = 26
0-9 = 10
hypen = 1
63^37
So for
What's the financial penalty for domain squatting per domain? I think Verisign just bankrupted each employee's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandch
So who's going to initiate the class action?
The script has a bug, for some reason it fails to work on words with three or less characters. Hopefully that'll be fixed in the next release.
:)
Did you raed the pgae at all? The piont is taht you keep the frist and lsat lerttes the smae, so for a trhee letetr wrod (or lses) nthoing gtes chenagd. Idoit!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=78588&cid=6966 974
I guess someone submitted it as a story. Too bad the AC didn't get any credit.
I am no more a racist than you are a religious zealot.
:)
Check out the link and see how much of a "zealot" I am. You'll be amused.
[his name sounds] scary to me....but maybe I'm a bit paranoid.
Maybe you're a bit racist.
From the article:
"Yoran helped to found network scanning company RipTech Inc. of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1998. After RipTech was acquired by antivirus giant Symantec Corp. for $145 million in August 2002, Yoran stayed on as Symantec vice president of worldwide managed security services operations, according to Symantec spokesman Cris Paden."
Anyone care to wager how soon the government starts awarding contracts/grants to Symantec for its exclusive security solution?
You should try KDE's KMail with gpg integration.
It is milk-simple and as easy to use as a nipple.
So given the experience that the male population on Slashdot has had with the gender owning said nipples, does that mean you're saying it's very difficult?
Therefore, the one penny takes 10 seconds.
So neither of you were right, but the OP was closer.
See how easy it is? I defrauded hundreds of intelligent slashdotters out of 4 seconds and only one person realized it.
If micropayments ever become ubiquitous, I think we'll start seeing the old "salami slicing" hack again. When a lot of stuff you do online costs a nickel here, a penny there, a dime elsewhere... you can rack of some pretty serious numbers of transactions just browsing around. After all, if loading that New York Times article linked to from Slashdot is only 2 cents, who cares, right?
But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to steal 1 cent a month from 1,000,000 people who use micropayments? After all, who's going to notice a line item titled "News article ----- $0.01"? So there's $10,000/month that nobody's really going to miss.
And for a single penny, would most people take the time to make a phone call or write an email to request clarification on where that charge originated? Even if all you make is a pitiful $3.60/hour, that one penny takes a mere 6 seconds to earn, far shorter than the time it would take to investigate. And is the micropayment company going to investigate your 1 cent dispute? Likely they would ignore you or even just automatically refund your penny without much thought.
New Zealand, perhaps?
I mean, I don't live there, and haven't, in fact, ever even been there... But it may be something to look into.
[random country here], perhaps?
I mean, I don't live there, and haven't, in fact, ever even been there, and to be honest, I don't know a thing about it other than what I've seen in pretty pictures, and I haven't heard about it one way or the other quite frankly... But it may be something to look into.
the dude who painted the melting clocks.
If you ever have the urge to sum up an artist's work in one sentence again... don't.
Yeah, but who was that dude who sketched all those fucked-up stairways?
There is also a difference between calling an idea without merit (even stupid) and inferring the presenter of that idea is an idiot.
I appologize for flaming you for that. I seem to have been a bit hasty reading your post. However, when I look at your first point again, I just have to ask .. how much work do you think that webinterface and the following filters would be to implement? I can't fathom the amount of ugly hacks needed. I can't see any good way to implement in any of the systems I've worked on.
I don't have your experience with various systems, but I can see how such things could be implemented. A software firewall could be modified to check whether certain ports are flagged for additional rules. If so, check the memory cache for the rules. If not present, those rules and the current person's IP is looked up in a database. The web interface could add to that database. Or the firewall could keep in memory a list of the last n port 25's accessed with a timeout value (eg: one hour). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how this presents such a tremendous challenge.
Bullshit. It's quite practical to run ones own mailserver for ones own private domains. Of course, many people "don't see the use", and think that "one can just use the ISP's outgoing mailserver". Bollocks I say.
Of course. However, many ISPs specifically state in their AUP that you are not allowed to run your own servers, so how would this be effectively any different? I understand the practical need for some to run their own mail servers. I do it myself. But "Joe Six-Pack" out there running an unpatched Windows 98 on an AOL account certainly has little need to do this.
Indeed, and usually more expensive. What I want is quite simply a link with some bandwidth - no tech support (but a competent NOC, when things fail on their side), no bullshit. They don't need to provide a webserver, mailserver, newsserver or anything - just give me the damn bandwidth and an IP address and shut up about it. Oh, and please - they could have a good abuse department to cut off actual abusers.
/bin/mail or any of the other clients I tend to use have that option [proxy] -- never _Seen_ it though.
And I'm sure there are ISPs which will provide this. The trick is allowing power users to have the freedom they need and keeping out the Clueless Cathys of the world from fucking it up for everyone else.
I have to admit that I haven't checked whether pine, mutt,
I'm talking about the regular users who use Windoze. If you use command-line mail software, you don't fall into that category. However, this is irrelevant to the technical merits (or lack thereof) of what I presented.
Good netizen? To break end-to-end connectivity by random blocking? bullshit.
Many ISPs "break end-to-end connectivity" by blocking port 135 already, as just one example. Remember that all security is a trade-off. And nobody's forcing you to have port 25 restricted on *your* connection either. As I see it, it boils down to this: power users want high speed unrestricted connections at low cost. Clueless users with their viruses cause more technical support problems and use up more bandwidth, slowing the network down for others and incurring more costs for the ISP. This increased cost is shared by everyone, so the responsible power users are punished.
If someone wants unrestricted
All of which are idiot solutions. It's a hack, and it's a damn ugly hack. Blocking outbound port 25 breaks the option of having an external host with authentication which you can connect to and do your stuff. Which is irritating to say the least.
[Ignoring your trolling...] It's not a total block, as I pointed out. Merely a limitation. What residential internet user really needs to connect to thousands of SMTP servers per hour directly? Er, none. Unless someone is running their own email server... but then that's a business use not residential. There will always be ISPs to cater to the business/poweruser market.
A proxy server would have to be supported by all the pieces of software in use. Not fscking likely
Only by the mail clients. How many mail clients *don't* support sending mail via proxy these days? A very rare few. And we're only talking outbound email here. And for really old clients which don't support outbound mail via proxy, instead of sending your email out through mail.yourserver.com, you simply send it out through mail.yourisp.com. As I pointed out right at the top, your ISP's port 25 wouldn't be blocked, subject to the usual volume and content restrictions.
The "allow 10 hosts per dialup connection per DHCP lease, per hour" option _could_ be alright, hadn't it been for the _slight_ problem that it would be hell to implement in most cases.
It's up to the ISPs as to whether this hell would be worth it to implement. Customer protection + bandwidth savings + good netizen karma > implementation hell?
Typo... instead of:
This should satisfy even power users as few need to check mail on over 10 different servers.
The correct version is:
This should satisfy even power users as few need to send mail to over 10 different servers.
It is true that since Sobig uses its own SMTP server the ISP would have to do the monitoring via a port 25 monitor. I'm not completely sure how difficult/expensive this would be to implement on a large scale, but there's an opportunity for someone who comes up with a cheap solution. I suppose it could be part of a general IDS, but it needs to be something price-accessible to an ISP.
This is trivial. Allow for normal port 25 access to the ISP's email server (with the usual restrictions on volume and content) and, for external port 25 access, there's a number of possibilities:
1. Allow the client to setup a pre-determined list of specific hosts they want to connect to. This might be done using a web-based interface.
2. Only allow the first 10 hosts (per dialup connection, per DHCP lease, per hour, etc.) to be accessible via port 25. This should satisfy even power users as few need to check mail on over 10 different servers. Adjust number as appropriate.
3. Setup a proxy service which allows unlimited port 25 access. Any viruses which include their own SMTP delivery engines won't know about the proxy and will simply fail. There's no additional security risk to using your ISP's proxy than using the ISP's connection itself, as both can be logged with equal ease.
Unless I misunderstand you (and I'm seriously jet-lagged), your assumption is that all Outlook clients are configured with broken mail filters? I'm sorry, that's just not true.
Most, if not all, rejection notices I've received have come from the mail server, not from the client. A lot of ISPs now offer virus scanning as a free feature in order to compete with the other ISPs which have this standard. Companies have their corporate email gateways which, more often than not, have antivirus scanning. So email getting scanned for viruses, and not by the client program, is increasingly becoming the norm.
So yes, you're correct that it doesn't double. Perhaps a 50% increase instead? Still, not insignificant.
huh? If person A's infected machine sends out 100 emails, and the one received by person Q generates a reply to sender, how does this double the amount of traffic. Sheesh! Calm down.
... Person Q100's antivirus generates an email.
... Q100 all have antivirus filters.
In the off chance that you're not just trolling, you're clearly missing the obvious. Person A sends out 100 infected emails. Person Q1's antivirus generates an email to forged sender. Person Q2's antivirus generates an email... Person Q3's antivirus generates... 97 emails later
Ergo, 100 viruses sent out, 100 replies from autogenerated "you sent an email" messages. This assumes Q1
...traffic than you'd have if the worm got to its target and continued spreading.
That's a lousy argument for obvious poor behavior on the part of anti-virus software. It's like saying every time the police catch a violent criminal, they should kick the ass of some random citizen. Hey, it may be annoying, but it's still less violence than you'd have if the criminal got to their target and acted violently.
I always figured the general pattern was that to work in country A, you need to be a citizen of country A or have a work permit issued by country A. Did this suddenly stop applying in the case of Americans wanting to work in India?
Better call up George Bush and have him bomb the hell out of India. How dare those Indians deny Americans their god-given right to work anywhere they damn well please?